Last Updated: March 2025
In today’s competitive digital landscape, businesses are increasingly turning to SaaS email marketing strategies to engage customers and drive conversions. According to recent studies, the number of email users will go up to 4.6 billion by 2025 worldwide.
For SaaS companies, implementing well-crafted email campaigns can help build relationships with prospects, boost user engagement, and foster long-term customer loyalty. In this article, we will explore some of the most effective SaaS email marketing strategies, backed by real-world examples that highlight their success.
Table of Contents
What is a SaaS Email Marketing Strategy?
Does Email Marketing Work for SaaS?
Complexities of SaaS Email Marketing
Email Marketing for SaaS Companies
Making List for SaaS Email Marketing Strategy
Tools You Need For SaaS Email Marketing
What is a SaaS Email Marketing Strategy?
A SaaS email marketing strategy is a tailored approach used by Software as a Service (SaaS) companies to engage with potential customers, nurture leads, and retain existing users through targeted email campaigns.
These strategies often involve a series of emails designed to educate users about the product, highlight its benefits, and guide them through the customer journey—from initial awareness to purchase and beyond.
Does Email Marketing Work for SaaS?
For SaaS Businesses, Email Marketing is key for companies to engage with leads and nurture, onboard new users & reduce churn. This includes highly personalized emails like segmentation and behavior-based campaigns that can lead to up to 46% higher open rates compared with general email campaigns/newsletters.
Complexities of SaaS Email Marketing
In a typical email marketing funnel for an online store or business selling information products, they have to deal with just 1 list of leads. They then nurture these leads, send sales campaigns (either evergreen or manual), and try to turn those leads into customers. A purchase is typically made once and the cycle ends.
Yes, some marketers will send post-purchase follow-ups but many of these are very simple drip campaigns at the most.
On the other hand, when a lead to SaaS companies converts into a customer is where real stuff happens. Get users on board and then ensure they are successfully using your product so you keep the relationship with them alive. Compounded with transactional emails (password resets, product notifications), you have even more sport to handle.
But more importantly, if and when a lead converts into a paying customer that data is opened up (allowing for super specific behavioral-based email marketing), which of course are the building blocks to lifetime relational success.
Email Marketing for SaaS Companies
The idea that SaaS email marketing is one-size-fits-all is absolutely a misunderstanding of them all. It’s a mix of three types of emails that are customized based on where someone is in the journey from marketing leads to trials and then customers.
Of course, you want your brand style and voice to match up in all communication, but the stakes & processes will differ for each stage.
There are three main types of emails that every SaaS business has to pay attention
A. Marketing Emails – Lead magnets, nurture campaigns, sales promotions, and newsletters designed to win over or convert prospects.
B. Lifecycle Emails – Once users sign up, these are the emails that will be sent to them and they are essential for onboarding new customers as well as helping existing ones upgrade to paid plans (and ultimately more loyal in the long term).
C. Transactional Emails – Service-based emails (e.g., password resets, product notifications, billing invoices) — They keep users up to date on critical account-specific activities.
All these serve a different purpose in terms of engaging and guiding the customer on their journey.
A. Marketing Emails
When it comes to SaaS, marketing emails are used for educating and nurturing leads centered around their products. All these emails are permission-based and sent ONLY to recipients who asked for them.
This process revolves around your email marketing list, a list of leads who have opted-in to receive emails, for example after downloading an incentive or registering for one of your webinars. This is also where it gets confusing because product users (both trial and paying customers) can be added here as well to provide them with marketing content.
The primary goal is to grow your email list and ultimately convert leads into product trials.
What kinds of campaigns should you send to your marketing email list?
- Lead Magnets
- Lead Nurture Campaigns
- Evergreen Sales Campaigns
- One-Time Broadcasts
- Evergreen Newsletters
Let’s dive into these campaigns and explore them in detail.
1. Lead Magnets
A lead magnet is an offer that you present to visitors as a reward for joining your email list, essentially turning them into cold leads. They are a proven, tried-and-true technique for building a real marketing email list that still works well even today.
Welcome emails generate 320% more revenue per email than other promotional emails.
As soon as a visitor subscribes to one of your lead magnets, it will then be your turn to provide the digital product you promised. This is done using an opt-in (a subscribe) followed by a “Thank You” email usually with an autoresponder. These are things that you can very easily set up in your email platform so as not to worry about them and make sure the first interaction with a new lead goes smoothly.
2. Lead Nurture Campaigns
Creating a lead nurture campaign that introduces new leads to your company, culture, and cornerstone knowledge. In other words, welcoming new leads to your email list.
SaaS Welcome Email Example
There are mainly two types of solutions for this. Different solutions to this are:
Option A: Allowing experts to fill the funnel with a lead nurturing session that’s more about adding value before making an attempt at selling This way you can gain the trust first and then deliver your product or service.
Option B: Or that you sell to new leads, but too aggressively. Instead, it is advised to produce a funnel through educational overlays that recast the relationship pattern.
In fact, the optimal way is probably somewhere between these two and it should be based on how your own brand prefers to communicate.
3. Evergreen Sales Campaigns
An Evergreen Sales Campaign is a term used to describe an automated series of sales emails that you send out to your most qualified leads. Rather, it is a series of emails dripping out over time that emphasize the problem your audience has and how incredibly best-fitted you are at solving it.
Key elements of an evergreen sales campaign include:
- Bridging the gap between your free content and your paid product.
- First selling the desired outcome, then offering your product as the way to achieve it.
- Highlighting the long, difficult path versus the quicker, more efficient solution you offer.
- Creating urgency to encourage a timely purchase.
- Addressing and overcoming potential objections.
59% of consumers agree that marketing emails influence their purchase decisions. Each of these steps translates into a dedicated email within the campaign, guiding leads toward conversion.
4. One-Time Broadcasts
A one-time broadcast is a unique email that will be sent to some group of leads or customers, either manually (where you select the people who will receive it) or scheduled ahead and without requiring any behavior-initiated action.
Broadcasts can include:
- Newsletters
- Product announcements
- Seasonal promotions
- Featured blog posts
- Webinar invitations, and more
Should you send these broadcasts to your entire email list? Not quite.
Broadcast communication incorporates drawing attention to those who are not currently in other key sequences (e.g., lead or user onboarding, sales campaigns). A tip to manage this is to establish a “Qualified for Updates” segment without the enrolment trigger of these workflows. Your broadcast emails are sent this way to your priority audience without interfering with important sequences.
5. Evergreen Newsletters
An evergreen newsletter campaign delivers your educational content over time, without you having to manually create weekly broadcasts. This is for people who are no longer in the onboarding or nurture flow and usually consists of some 20 up to as many as 50 emails, spaced out such that they go every week.
B. Lifecycle Emails
Generally, if we sign up and your app starts sending us a series of automatic emails (a.k.a) to nurture our lifecycle with the product. These emails are a key driver for User Activation, Retention, and Referrals (AARRR — Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue).
A lifecycle email automation is much like a customer success manager on autopilot. It does things like checking in with your accounts without you even lifting a finger.
Here are some ways you can leverage lifecycle emails:
- Onboard new users effectively
- Convert free trials and freemium users into paying customers
- Encourage upgrades to annual billing plans
- Promote upsells to higher-tier plans
- Reactivate dormant users and bring them back
- Engage with successful or underperforming accounts to foster conversations
- Collect feedback, reviews, and case studies
- Distribute referral links, promo codes, or branded swag
- Recover failed payments (also categorized as transactional)
- Send cancellation surveys to gain insights
SaaS Email Marketing Templates
That being said, it is a long process and since their growth significantly depends on activation rates, many companies over-focus just too much on Onboarding Emails. This has meant that other lifecycle automation possibilities remain underused.
But for these emails, the ROI is unbelievably high yet they are simple to set up and can easily be put on autopilot so you focus more time making profits than focusing on your conversion rate.
C. Transactional Emails
Transactional email is the ground where notifications bear their souls and are surgically stitched into your product. These are emails which linked with some user actions or account activities, such as:
- Password resets
- Billing reminders
- Failed payment alerts
- Product activity updates (e.g., new comments, projects, or reports)
Transactional Emails Examples
Because these emails are giving us important information, we need to receive it as soon as possible. Standard email marketing software like Mailchimp, Drip, etc are not good for this kind of thing as they send thousands of emails at once and usually there might be some delay in a few minutes to hours.
To get the email delivered to the inbox instantly, transactional emails are sent via direct API calls from your product (usually implemented by developers in early-stage implementations like password recovery flows, etc).
Transactional emails continue to receive high open rates as they deliver the necessary information. The boilerplate template for transactional email works universally across many industries because it simply maps message contents with the way users behave in response to various types of messages and subject lines.
But it also creates a marketing opportunity, where you can share product tips, post event details or offer incentives. However, a lot of marketers fail to take advantage of this and miss the opportunity to engage their audience.
Making List for SaaS Email Marketing Strategy
Case Study: Separating Marketing Leads from Customers vs All in One List
You have two options:
- Combine marketing and lifecycle emails in a single tool.
- Create duplicate lists on numerous platforms.
The best use of your time is to migrate all contacts into one list, and in most cases that single contact offers stronger results. Platforms like Saufter.io and Customer.io are good at getting everything done in one spot.
For more feature-rich, enterprise-grade tools I would recommend looking into Intercom and HubSpot. However, if you are dealing with a larger marketing database then segregating lists by responses can make sense.
That being said, a single list for it all makes sense, especially for someone with multiple apps. Better cross-promotion thanks to what apps users have subscribed to gathered within a single tool, this information can be leveraged to run highly focused campaigns across your portfolio.
Tools You Need For SaaS Email Marketing
For each type of email, you need a different kind of automation tool/respective Email Service Provider (ESP).
Common general-purpose ESPs are (simply) Mailchimp, Drip, ActiveCampaign, and even CampaignMonitor is a solution for managing marketing email campaigns (Stage A).
But they quickly break down when it comes to SaaS lifecycle emails (Stage B), as managing complex customer data is not the core competency of a general-purpose ESP. You must choose a dedicated SaaS Email Platform such as Saufter.io or Userlist, optimized for customer interactions and lifecycle automation.
Here are some key points of email marketing:
- 59% of respondents say email marketing directly impacts their purchase decisions.
- Marketing emails can influence 50.7% of subscribers to convert.
- Personalization and segmentation boost open rates (82%), click-through rates (75%), and customer satisfaction (58%).
- 50% of recipients make a purchase through email marketing at least once a month.
- 73% of people view email as an excellent marketing channel.
- Marketers experience a 56% increase in sales with personalized experiences.
- Around 69% of users delete emails without optimization, and 42.3% of shoppers specifically delete emails that aren’t optimized for mobile devices.
- Email has an average click-through rate of 3.71% and an open rate of 22.86% across all industries.
- Basket abandonment emails typically have an average open rate of 40.14%, indicating strong engagement with customers who have left items in their cart.
- An attractive email design can boost the open rate by up to 40% and the click-through rate by up to 29%.
Saufter.io – The Best AI-Powered Email Automation Platform
Saufter is a customer support and email management platform designed to streamline communication and enhance customer service for businesses. It offers a range of features, such as automated email workflows, ticketing systems, and integration with multiple channels like WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. This multi-channel integration enables businesses to consolidate all customer interactions in one place, improving response times and customer satisfaction.
One of Saufter’s standout features is its ability to automate routine tasks through rules and workflows, allowing businesses to route, categorize, and assign emails to the appropriate agents efficiently. Additionally, Saufter supports customizable email templates to ensure consistent branding and communication.
Another useful tool within the platform is its integration with knowledge bases, making it easier to provide self-service options for customers directly through email or chat interactions. These features make Saufter ideal for businesses looking to manage large volumes of customer communication while maintaining quality service and boosting productivity through automation.
For businesses focused on customer retention and efficient communication, Saufter’s automation-first approach makes it a valuable choice among customer service solutions.
Conclusion
In conclusion, adopting effective SaaS email marketing strategies can significantly enhance customer engagement and drive growth. Research shows that email marketing has an average ROI of $42 for every $1 spent, making it one of the most cost-effective channels for businesses.
Platforms like Saufter demonstrate the power of automation by enabling businesses to integrate customer data across multiple channels, automate workflows, and deliver personalized communication efficiently.
By leveraging tools like Saufter to automate both lifecycle and transactional emails, SaaS companies can maintain meaningful customer relationships at scale, ultimately boosting retention and lifetime value.
