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Attract and Convert B2B SaaS Customers With Effective Email Marketing

Introduction

Bottom line, if a company cannot take the time to understand who their buyer is and what they need, consumers are no longer willing to bear the brunt and spend their precious time reading mass-produced content that focuses on the product and company.

Marketers must create highly personalized content that recipients value, but they are also battling against a wave of "don't use my data" from the general public. Marketing data enforcement has fallen short year after year, but many marketers feel that their days in the data wild west are fast approaching an end. Now is the time to switch to first-party data and personalized journeys.

This research note will teach marketers how to effectively develop a relationship with their buyers through email marketing. It will guide them in collecting the right data for segmentation and creating personalized email marketing journeys that increase conversion for the B2B SaaS customer.

Understand Your Buyer’s Needs: Make Your Campaigns Count

Segment your audience according to data such as their buyer persona, job title, lead source, and where they are at in their customer journey. Other ways to segment include engagement, such as identifying those subscribers that frequently read and open emails.

B2B marketing content should focus on expert advice, how the buyer will achieve ROI, and effectiveness backed by data. The B2B buyer mindset revolves less around saving money or emotional factors and more around crafting a message that answers the question "What's in it for me?" (WIIFM). This message is rooted in addressing the logical (data-driven) and financial (data-driven) requirements of accomplishing their tasks in an easier or better way. Email campaigns should educate buyers, which is why campaigns that drive to webinars, white papers, and case studies generally perform well for B2B.

Purchasing a B2B SaaS product is often a long-term decision with a longer sales cycle than the shorter B2C cycles – this means that your email campaign will be tasked with developing this relationship. Bring Sales into the process once you have built a campaign to nurture your MQL into an SQL. This can be achieved through an email marketing campaign that includes ways to help them make a purchasing decision and proves value to their buying committees.

Learn more:

Create Assets to Accelerate the Buyer Journey

Understand the Goals: Email as a Channel

The type of email should be chosen according to the buyer's journey. Despite its declining performance in recent years, email still is one of the easiest and least expensive ways to bring buyers through their journey.

Email campaigns can be categorized into these primary categories and related goals:

Type of Email	Description	Goal
Welcome	Sent to a new email subscriber to introduce the company or product.	Set the tone for the relationship, and lead them to the next step in the journey
Product feature	Educational in nature. These emails do best when they focus on the WIIFM message to a specific buyer persona.	Educate and inform, communicate value
Discount	Offers a discount in order to trigger an event. Use with caution as buyers come to expect them, and thereby categorize the product into a cost-leader (cheaper but not better category).	Increase conversions
Free trial conversion	Highlights value, addresses objections and concerns, encourages a free trial user to convert to a paying customer.	Conversion to paid customer
Loyalty	Emphasizes value received to encourage customers to renew subscriptions.	Create brand loyalty and multiple-year subscriptions
Trigger	Sent as part of a workflow that occurs once a customer takes a certain action. Examples include lead score reached or lead magnet downloaded trigger emails.	Create an action such as registration or purchase.
Events	Encourage attendance at events like webinars or in-person conferences.	Increase event sales, build engagement
Social proof	People just like you recommend this product or product add-on. Often takes the form of success stories, testimonials, or case studies.	Cross-sell and upsell
Abandoned cart	Reminds the user of the item in the cart and offers assistance to complete the purchase.	Increase conversions
Re-engage	Offers one-time-only incentives to resubscribe after a customer is lost.	Recover lost ARR

Identify Your Unique Value Prop: Translate That Into the Buyer’s Needs and Goals

Understand and describe the unique benefit. Your product's unique value proposition goes far beyond a description of what your product does. Many marketers stop and say something that can be likened to saying your car is an automobile instead of going deeper and saying the ta car is the mechanism by which you move forward and enjoy life and experience point A, B, and C in a short time.

Few tips deliver more value to a campaign than the advice to customize it to one persona and speak to what they need through personalized content that meets the needs defined in message map architecture. Understand their pain points, personalize them, and back up your claims with proof.

Learn more: Develop the Right Message to Engage Buyers

MarTech: A Foundational Pillar of Success

Use the right tech to support your goals. Select the right technology to support your campaigns, test and optimize, and measure and report metrics.

Personalize your campaigns using email software, testing, analytics, and attribution that is customized for the job. Marketers with outdated and clunky MarTech – those running email campaigns that need a Ph.D.-level graduate to code – are guaranteed to fail. Modern-day marketers must select and implement the right match or be doomed to fall behind the competition.

Email marketing software should meet the following requirements:

Email preferences: The software should allow users to select their email preferences, including frequency and campaign types.

List hygiene management:The software should provide an easy opt-out.

A/B testing:The software should have A/B testing capabilities to test campaigns and optimize performance.

Analytics and reporting: The ability to track and measure the performance of email campaigns is critical to understanding user behavior, including metrics such as open and clickthrough rates and conversions.

Scheduling and automation:The software should allow email to automatically be sent when certain conditions are met (i.e. triggers). There should also be more basic functionality to schedule for specific times and days.

Prebuilt automation:This capability will allow for a more straightforward configuration of automated campaigns based on common email marketing campaign scenarios.

Contact segmentation:The ability to segment contacts into different lists of groups allows for targeting and personalization.

Dynamic content:Incorporating content such as name, location, and title. Are you sending an email to Sally, or are you sending an email to Sally, the SaaS buyer at XYZ Corp, who has already purchased products A, B, and C in the past? Personalization counts for a lot; don't underestimate this functionality.

Email deliverability:Measures such as spam testing and domain authentication, as well as compliance with regulations.

Mobile optimization:Software templates are optimized for the high percentage of customers reading the content from their mobile devices.

MarTech integration:Integrates with other MarTech, especially CRM and e-commerce platforms. This integration enables data to be shared and synchronized across the customer journey. Getting a singular view of truth and customer data is key to better decisions.

Benchmarking capabilities: Easy-to-read analytics about how your campaigns and content compare to industry averages and how best practices help even junior-level executives create better email campaigns.

Easy-to-use templates:The software should have a simple way to create a bespoke email campaign without involving a Ph.D.-level developer.

Again, this cannot be overstated: Use the right email marketing platform to ensure that your emails are competitive against a saturated landscape.

Learn More:

Compare and Evaluate the Best Email Marketing Software

Select a Marketing Management Suite

Clean Old Lists: Opt-In

Clean your list. Email campaigns should be sent to prospects that have opted to receive communications.

If your list is stale, create an opt-in campaign. Allow customers to choose if they want to interact with you through permission marketing. This will help you grow a quality list with high attention and engagement rather than one that has never consented to communication.

Data and privacy compliance laws are changing quickly, but there are technology platforms and guidance to help marketers not fall behind. Ensure that there is a single source of truth for your unsubscribes across all platforms in order to maintain accurate data.

It is important to adhere to the most recent legal requirements when creating both email campaigns and selecting a MarTech solution. Unified consent and preference management software can solve the problem of large lists with unclear consent and build a unified single source of truth. Consult with your legal counsel as to how local, country, and international laws impact your email marketing campaigns.

Learn More:

Privacy by Design for Digital Marketing

Select the Best Consent & Preference Management Software

Best Practices: Tips to Optimize

Consider the following advice to optimize open rates, mobile experience, and images. Since the audience views emails on different devices, ensure the first five words of the subject line draw their attention. Avoid words that are not related to the email topic.

Use a bottom-line-on-top approach to writing email content, with the most important statements at the top three lines of the email. This incentivizes them to read further since this content will be seen most.

People open emails twice if they are interested, once when they receive it, and then open later when they have the time, so the unique open rate metric is crucial since it is a more accurate understanding of email engagement.

To maintain accuracy and avoid inflating numbers, exclude any bot or security software opens from the metrics.

Many email campaigns forget to link the company's logo back to the website, which is a best practice and gives readers an easy way to click through.

A/B testing should include different test lines as well as different colors and calls to action for the buttons.

Resize images for email and add alt text for images, as many email systems will prevent images from being downloaded when a user first opens them.

Recommendations

Clean your contact list.
Evaluate and select the right email MarTech.
Ensure that you meet local and international email marketing laws.
Identify and record metrics, and build a personalized email campaign to improve specific metrics for a specific persona.
Include various email types appropriate to each buyer journey stage.
Use our best practices to test and optimize emails and campaigns.
Measure success metrics and report on the outcome of the strategy.

Conclusion

Buyers are no longer willing to bear the brunt of digesting endless reams of email content that has nothing to do with them and what they need. Companies that do not update their email marketing strategy to create personalized WIIFM journeys for buyers will end up in the spam folder, irreparably damaging the brand’s reputation and placement in a fiercely competitive SaaS market. Leading B2B SaaS marketers are instead delivering personalized journeys through targeted email campaigns that meet their buyers where they are at on their journey and increase competitive differentiation in the saturated market.