saas onboarding emails
Get Your SaaS On Board
Bad onboarding will…
Leave trial users feeling overwhelmed or confused (or ghosted)
Ruin the opportunity to help a person with your product
Cost you money as you pump efforts into lead acquisition only to be met with low conversion rates
Great onboarding will…
Guide new users to their “a-ha” moments faster, making sure they’re hooked by the time their trial is done
Set customers up for long term success by helping them achieve their goals
Establish a relationship with your brand and position you as a valuable resource
Onboarding email breakdowns
Customer.io is all about targeted emails and triggered push notifications, so I was curious to see what their onboarding email sequence is like.
Lookie! Another triggered onboarding email sequence! Plus, “less is more” design.
Pipefy is a process management system that offers a free “small team” account. Since there’s no “free trial” time, I captured the emails I received during the first month of being a user.
Wistia knows video — but how’s their email game?
Hits and misses during the first month of the Zoom Basic Plan.
An email marketing service sending me marketing emails.
SurveyMonkey patiently (and persistently) waited for me to take action.
Mint aims to financially empower users and uses emotion to its advantage during the first 30 days.
The FreshBooks free trial is 30-days long and covers plenty of ground. The first 15 days are profiled in Part 1, and the second 15-day stretch is explored below.
Best practices + examples
Ever wondered what makes onboarding email design effective? Here are 12 great examples.
I compared 153 SaaS email subject lines to find common themes, best practices, and style choices.
10 examples of great SaaS emails and why their copy rocks.
Email subject lines are tiny but mighty details in your SaaS email marketing strategy. After all, they play gatekeeper to everything inside the email. Here are 120+ examples to kickstart your creative process.
Need a template for a SaaS or B2B onboarding email? Here’s one to get you started!
Need a template for a SaaS or B2B lead nurture email? Here’s one to get you started!
Need a template for a SaaS or B2B cold email? Here’s one to get you started!
Stuck in an email rut? Here are 35 ways to engage with users through email.
I’ve previously compared the onboarding cadence across five 14-day free SaaS trials. Today we’re going to review the cadence of onboarding emails for 5 different SaaS companies over the first 30 days.
How many emails should you send during a free trial? We’re going to review the cadence of onboarding emails for 5 different SaaS companies with 14-day free trials.
SaaS Email Strategy
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.
Here are 5 questions to as your trial users, and how to use their answers to improve lead generation + onboarding.
If you have onboarding emails that you want to update but aren’t sure where to start—this post is for you.
Need a template for a SaaS or B2B re-engagement or winback email? Here’s one to get you started!
Need a template for a SaaS or B2B engagement email? Here’s one to get you started!
How I helped strategize a product pre-sale email funnel
Have you ever sat down to write an email and wondered what the heck to talk about? Staring at a blank page is hard, and falling into a trap of randomly throwing down information is easy. That’s why it’s important to consider your user’s goals (and your desired outcomes) before you start writing.
See real email examples and how they align with a customer desired action map.
You can’t control users, but you can strategically direct them.
I get it — SaaS onboarding isn’t as enticing as lead generation. You don’t have to love it, but please avoid these cardinal sins.
Who am I?
I’m a SaaS copywriter, email strategist, and content marketer who ended up here through some perfect storm of circumstance.
My interest in onboarding emails came from an intersection between working on email strategy projects for a marketing agency, as well as content marketing for a customer-success-focused SaaS.
I was always tasked with finding examples for email strategy projects and, frustratingly, could only ever find one-off emails. They were like really great 5-minute clips from a movie I’ve never seen - AKA they give you no context about the bigger picture.
So I started collecting entire email sequences, specifically for SaaS free trials.
Some companies I’ve blogged for
“Steph had the ability to understand our business and target audience, allowing her to make the most effective blogs, emails, and sales funnels for our marketing campaigns and SEO. She is very organized, creative, and responsive to our business needs.”
-Tyler, Sparkage
Grammarly helps me be a better writer, but can I help them be a better email-er? (Yikes, back to Grammarly I go)