How to Decide Which Emails in a Series to Keep — Get Your SaaS On Board
There’s never a shortage of choices to be made in SaaS email marketing.
Which email series do we need? Is the tone of this email okay? What day should we send this? How do we know it’s working?
We can’t tackle every email marketing decision today (sorry), but I do plan on making your life at least a little bit easier. This post is for anyone that has a set of emails that they’re considering updating.
I tend to write about onboarding emails most, but this thought framework can really be applied to any of your SaaS emails.
The goal of this post is to help you sort out which emails you should keep, which you should edit, and which you should trash.
You can use this process for auditing existing email series, or as a check before you finalize a new batch of messages. This thought process is similar to how I conduct onboarding email breakdowns and can be used alongside this post about auditing strategy.
6 Questions to Audit Your SaaS Emails
There are three primary email components you’ll use to audit your emails: subject line, contents, and CTA. The subject line affects your open rates, while the contents are make-or-break for click-throughs. The five questions below are useful for checking both your subject line and email copy.
Does it have a clear objective?
Sometimes I think of emails like arrows. If they aren’t clearly pointing to the next step, they’re failing at their job. When you look at a particular email, can you name one next step that people should do? If the objective isn’t clear, someone may not act.
Also, consider whether or not the email is accurate to what it leads to. A beautiful arrow that says one thing but takes someone to another isn’t good. The button should either take a person to where they need to be to carry out the action or give them directions for how to get there.
Keep the email if there’s a clear next step and the destination makes it easy peasy for someone to take action.
Edit the email if there’s too much going on.
Delete the email if it never had an objective, never will, or doesn’t tell a compelling story.
Is it customer-focused?
Your only chance of success as a company is if you help people succeed. As such, your emails need to be customer first. I’m not telling you to ditch awesome social proof, but try to float customer benefits to the top. Put yourself in the shoes of the user and ask “what’s in it for me?” to check for this. Each email should highlight benefits, solve an issue, connect with their experience, etc.
Keep the email if you address why a person would care.
Edit the email if it’s too technical or focuses too much on you.
Delete the email if there’s no way to make the content benefit the reader or make them feel more secure in their decision, inspired to take action, etc.
Want to see what a customer-focused edit looks like firsthand? Below is an email I received as part of my Customer.io Onboarding Email Breakdown.
Although I like the email overall, I suggest a simple edit to make it more compelling for readers:
“When it comes to getting customers to stick around, there are no silver bullets. But you do have one marketing channel that’s more effective than all the others to draw people back: email.
The trick? Respond to your users’ engagement — or lack thereof.
You can increase user engagement by sending targeted emails with Customer.io
Here are a few ideas: Congratulate power users, and prompt them to invite friends. Stay top-of-mind with people who are becoming less active. Tell new users about your stickiest features.
Want to use email to keep customers around? Get inspired with this list of seven retention emails.”
All I did was swap the order of two sentences in the middle. By moving the customer-focused statement first, the reader is pulled into the story through a familiar pain, offered an answer, and then served a solution.
Originally published at https://www.getyoursaasonboard.com on July 18, 2019.
