SaaS Onboarding Emails: What You Need to Know
Leads. Acquisition. Churn. Monthly recurring revenue. Product updates. Customer success.
There’s a lot to manage in a SaaS company, which sometimes leaves onboarding emails pushed to the side. When you’re so focused on attracting customers and getting them to try your product, creating free trial emails seems like a lower priority.
I’ve got some truths for you, though. First, SaaS onboarding emails are too important to overlook. Second, you don’t need to be intimidated by them.
I’ve spent the past year going all-in on SaaS onboarding emails. I have an inbox chock full of them, and a ton of onboarding email breakdowns to match. I’ve also been writing the ins and outs of onboarding email best practices for my email list.
Now, it’s time to bring all that scattered information together into your go-to resource for learning about SaaS onboarding emails. It’s like all of my individual posts coming together for one big happy family reunion. Only this family reunion has actually helpful information, not a bombardment of questions about your dating life or career prospects.
This post is looong, so here’s a handy guide.
Table of Contents
What are SaaS Onboarding Emails?
First things first - what are SaaS onboarding emails?
SaaS onboarding emails, or free trial emails, are the messages you send to new users and customers to get them acquainted with your product. These emails help new users see the value of your tool and build new habits.
When Should You Use Onboarding Emails?
Now let’s explore when you should send onboarding (AKA free trial) emails. Well, as the name implies, they’re most common during a user’s free trial period. If you use a freemium model, you’ll send onboarding emails when a new user signs up.
What if someone signs up for a free trial and then converts to a paid plan the next day - should they drop out of the onboarding sequence? Not necessarily. As you’ll see as we move through this post, onboarding emails serve a specific purpose and are created strategically.
Just because someone has upgraded doesn’t mean they’re automatically an expert user who knows just what to do next.
Onboarding emails can even be helpful when a person upgrades or downgrades to a different plan with unique features or limits.
Why Onboarding Emails for SaaS are Critical
Alright, folks. It’s time for me to break down why SaaS onboarding emails matter. They are tiny, but MIGHTY, let me tell you. To do this, let’s run through a few scenarios.
Scenario 1 - Onboarding Fail
Sales Sally has been a bit frustrated by her CRM tool lately. One day she’s scrolling through Facebook on her lunch break and sees an ad from a new solution. She’s heard of the company before, and their landing page is convincing, so she signs up for a 14-day trial. Then Sally gets an email about yet another fire she has to put out with her team. Then she has to run right into a meeting with her manager. The next morning she has to get started right away on a task she’s a bit behind on.
The days fly by, and guess what? Sally received two emails from that CRM free trial that faded into the background of her inbox. Sally forgot that she had signed up, and the company didn’t do much to remind her. Her trial ends before she really got started.
Scenario 2 - Onboarding Fail
Accounting Albert runs payroll at a small startup and decides that maybe it’s time to upgrade his processes as the company grows. He looks around at a few companies and decides to give one a shot. He’s excited to get started, and the company sends him a welcome email that tells him what to do first. Then they send an email every day about all of their amazing features. Seriously, there’s so many, and they want to tell Albert all about them. Albert gets a little overwhelmed and isn’t sure where to start, so he sticks with his spreadsheets and old way of doing things because the show must go on.
Scenario 3 - Onboarding Win
Marketing Mary knows that if she doesn’t stop planning her campaigns via post-its and voice memos, she’s gonna lose her damn mind. So she decides to try a marketing planning and automation tool that she’s heard good things about.
Every few days, they tell her what information to add next. There’s a ton of capabilities with the tool, but the company has tailored its suggestions based on the goals she chose during sign up. They also sent her some case studies in an email, which were perfect for inspiring her teammates and getting buy-in.
Over the course of a month, Marketing Mary is reminded via email to log in and try something new. Slowly the new tool finds its way into her standard workflow. She’s done enough to see real potential in the tool, and upgrades to see a task through that she had started.
These scenarios all include an element that’s easy to forget when you’re working in front of a screen all day - the humans who use your product. Your company was created to help make someone’s life a little easier, and your onboarding emails should echo that sentiment.
The best way to help these everyday humans is to illuminate the path to whatever “success” is to them. SaaS users might be looking to increase sales, eliminate mistakes, or change their workflow. So the job of the onboarding emails is to help new users get up to speed as quickly as possible, and as predictably as possible.
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Onboarding Email Best Practices
Ready to dive into the details of what goes into a great onboarding email sequence? Here are my top three SaaS onboarding email strategy best practices:
Set realistic expectations
Let’s get real. There is only so much a person can achieve with your product during a free trial. Sure, there will always be edge case users who go 0 to 100 and dedicate a lot of time to get set up and totally change their business or process.
For the typical user, though, you need to set realistic expectations. Each user probably has a goal for where they’d like to be in a year, but you can’t get there in 14 days. Therefore, break down user goals into quick wins that they can get started right away.
You also may want to check the assumptions you have about where users are starting. Don’t jump into showing them the most complex features right away. Slowly trickle out larger or more complex tasks. Also, please, for the love of whatever you love, don’t overwhelm new users. Don’t tell them about every feature or use case under the sun. They simply can’t take all that in and truly process it in such a short amount of time.
Identify the critical steps
Onboarding is like a small creek. On one side, a user is unfamiliar with the product. On the other side, the person is confident using the tool and getting results. To help users across, you have to identify which stepping stones they should choose for the most efficient path.
This slightly abstract analogy illustrates the importance of defining a path for users. Which features should they use, and in what order? Given their goals, how should they use a tool for the biggest impact?
Once you’ve found this onboarding path (or at least made an educated guess to start with), go all-in on it. Turn off the noise of any other paths, and emphasize the impact of each point in the process.
Consistency and clarity
Nobody wants to feel like they’re bugging their users, and I totally get that. While there’s definitely such as thing as sending too many onboarding emails, it’s also possible to send too little.
Onboarding emails work as part of your omni-channel onboarding strategy and are perfect little reminders to log back in. People are busy and have full lives and brains, so please don’t send an email or two and call it a day. Following up is essential and helpful. Send emails consistently, and don’t assume you’re annoying people with your three emails a week.
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How Many Onboarding Emails Do You Need?
One of the most common questions I get asked is, “how many emails should I send?” I understand where you’re coming from, too. When I was first tasked with giving recommendations for email sequences, I Googled like a madwoman to find out on what days I should send emails.
The good and bad news is that it depends (please don’t hate me). Here are a few factors that could change how many emails you send, in addition to free trial length (which we’ll cover in a second):
How complicated your product is (simpler product, fewer emails)
How tech-savvy your audience is (need more guidance, need more emails)
How often current customers typically log in (monthly use doesn’t need daily emails)
What you’ve learned from past email tests
Perhaps one of the easiest factors to use as the basis for the number of onboarding emails you send is your free trial length. Here’s what I’ve learned from analyzing a ton of SaaS onboarding email sequences.
How many emails to send for a 7-day free trial
I don’t have much evidence to back up this idea, but it seems to me that 7-day trials are used more often with B2C companies than B2B. For example, a week is a pretty standard free trial length for streaming services or entertainment apps.
B2C onboarding is a topic I want to explore more in 2020 (stay tuned) ,but for now, here’s my recommendation.
Aim to send 3-4 emails during your 7-day free trial.
At first glance, that may seem like a lot of emails in not many days, but a week is not much time. With three emails, you have room for a welcome email (a must) and another few emails to get people acquainted with your service. This isn’t universal, but the 7-day trials I come across usually require a card upfront. This means that shorter trials won’t have the same “your trial is almost up, add your card now” emails that longer sequences have.
How many emails to send for a 14-day free trial
My first investigation into how many onboarding emails you should send started with this post. I took five of the free trial sequences I had collected and analyzed how many emails were sent, and when.
On average, 14-day trials send out 8.6 emails.
That’s a bit more than one every other day, but this isn’t a hard and fast rule. For example, Evernote sent 6 emails in the first two weeks while Shopify sent ten. There’s also no right or wrong cadence to send emails.
As a starting point, try this cadence:
Day 1 - Welcome email
Day 2 - Building Block email
Evenly space out other feature/ use case/ case study emails
Send trial ending reminders at the end
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How many emails to send for a 30-day free trial
After analyzing 14-day trials, I turned my attention to how many emails 30-day free trials should send. To my surprise, there wasn’t really a difference between two weeks and a month.
On average, a 30-day free trial sequence has 9 emails.
How could a trial be twice as long and still send the same number of emails? It could be that new users can’t necessarily absorb twice as much information, and they may not need to. Onboarding should show new users the most essential steps, not everything under the sun.
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Automated Vs. Triggered Onboarding
Another topic under the “how many onboarding emails should I send and when” umbrella is automated vs. triggered emails.
Automated, or time-based, emails are sent out on a regular schedule. A user who engages with the app a ton and a user that never logs in receives the same email sequence.
Triggered, or action-based, emails have rules in place for user action or inaction. The sequence could go faster for a very engaged user, or go down a separate track for a person that’s ghosting their trial.
I go more into the pros and cons of each strategy in this post, but here’s the cliff notes version.
Triggered emails are more personalized and relevant, but take a bit more planning and effort. Time-based emails, on the other hand, are simpler to strategize, but their “one-size-fits-all” nature may leave them not fitting some users at all.
So what should you do? Once again, the right answer depends on your product, your customers, and your team. Here’s a happy medium to start with:
Create a majority time-based email sequence, so nobody gets the silent treatment from you, but send reminders for the most important step.
The best email sequence strategy lies between fully time-based and fully triggered email sequences. It covers some of the pros of both methods and can be tailored to your team’s bandwidth. Want something simpler to start? Then do 95% time-based. Have some time to do experimentation? Then send some cohorts through triggered sequences. Also, keep in mind that your onboarding emails may change over time as you learn more about customer segments and how to help them be most successful.
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Coming Soon - B2B vs. B2C Onboarding Email Strategy
During the Q&A segment of a webinar I did with Userlane, someone asked about differences in B2C and B2B onboarding emails. Basically, all of my onboarding email breakdowns have been B2B companies, but I’m working on changing that. I’ve started collecting sequences for a few B2C apps to share with you all eventually.
If you have a company that you’d love to see a breakdown for, send me an email at hello@getyoursaasonboard.com with ideas!
👇 Watch more👇
Planning Your Onboarding Email Strategy
Is there anything more intimidating than a blank page at the beginning of a project? I totally understand that creating a new email sequence can seem like a daunting experience. Especially if you don’t come from an email or marketing background (where all my solo founders at?!)
The good news, though, is that we can build a free trial email series bit by bit. You don’t need to go from zero to subject lines in a day - in fact, you shouldn’t do that at all.
I’m a visual learner, and maybe you are too. I like to think most concepts can be reduced to a graphic of some sort, so I created an onboarding pyramid. I use it to:
Help you organize the steps and see how they fit together
Show that if you jump straight to writing emails, you’re missing the foundation of your strategy
I have individual posts for all of these concepts (which I link throughout this guide), but let’s run you through a crash course.
Understand user motivators + goals
The first stop on your onboarding email strategy journey is figuring out why users would care to use your app. This goes beyond your product benefits, too.
What’s driving a user to take action now? What could be the context with which a user signs up? Something is going on in their life that made them sign up for a trial now, and not three months ago or a year in the future. This context matters for how you present steps and features.
You also must understand what motivates a user to keep moving forward. Are they being pulled by a dream of a more efficient payroll process? Or pushed because they just can’t take the old, clunky tools they’ve been using.
Finally, what does success look like to a user? Understanding their goals helps you develop a roadmap to help get them there.
Identify challenges and hurdles
After you’ve discovered the sunshine and rainbows that are user goals, it’s wise to confront what may stop them. What challenges or hurdles could get in the way of customer success? These challenges can exist both in and outside your app.
Outside your app, users are fighting an uphill battle of changing existing habits. If you’ve ever tried to change your routine or stick to a resolution, you know how easy it is to lose motivation or make excuses. Your customers can also be facing external pressures, such as not having much extra time at work to get familiar with the app. Plus, a user may have to advocate for a product and get supervisor buy-in or get an entire team up to speed.
Other hurdles to product adoption a user may face live within your app. Features that need data input, complicated tools, or unclear steps all get in the way.
Let’s be real - onboarding emails can’t resolve issues with your product or in-app experience. They can, however, address these hurdles and do their best to minimize the perceived barriers and propel users right past those sticking points.
Determine what can be accomplished
Your users have a mountain of a goal...and a two-week trial. We’ve all heard the saying about not being able to build Rome in a day, and it applies to your users as well. I think it’s handy to split user goals into three categories.
Quick wins are items a person can check off their list or results that can be seen within a day or two.
Intermediate goals take a little bit longer to achieve but can be accomplished within a free trial (or at least be on their way!)
Long-term targets are the results that lead to raving reviews and happy customers. For most people and products, this will take some time to get to. Don’t try to tackle these during a free trial.
Why do these categories matter? Well, you don’t want to break off more than new users can chew during their free trial. You can get them to a few quick wins and some progress on intermediate goals, but don’t try to move them too far along too quickly.
Create a desired action map
It’s time to talk about my (not-really-so-secret) secret ingredient to SaaS email marketing strategies: the desired action map.
At its core, the desired action map is simply a list of steps you want each user to take during onboarding. I usually lay it out as a timeline to visualize the email series, but it can be as simple as a few bullet points.
If you remember back to the analogy about crossing the onboarding creek, the desired actions are those stepping stones. Given what you know about user goals and motivations along with your product, you need to choose essential tasks.
A good starting place is 3-5 essential actions.
Actions can include trying a particular feature, adding a key piece of data or info, viewing useful information, adding team members, or even logging in with a particular frequency.
Once you’ve selected the few key actions, you use these steps as a guiding light for building your emails. These steps almost act as a checklist that you compare email content to. Are you calling attention to each of the steps in the order they make the most sense?
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How to Track Onboarding Email Success
You want emails that actually perform, not just sound good. I get that. Here are some tips about tracking the success of your onboarding emails.
First, there are three phases of onboarding to track. Not every user will go through every phase at the same time, but it’s a useful starting point.
Exploration is all about getting users to try your product. Track the click-through rate of the email to see what positioning resonates with users. The objective here is getting users out of the inbox and into your app.
Engagement is the phase where you want customers to start consistently using the tools you give them. Give them increasingly larger tasks and use emails as a reminder to keep chipping away at their goals. In this phase, you’ll track metrics like login frequency and feature adoption.
Adoption is the ideal ending to a free trial. You want trial users to turn to customers, so track conversions. Remind them of what’s possible in the future and prompt them to upgrade to a paid account.
Before we move on to onboarding warning signs, I want to talk about benchmarks for a second. You want to know what a “good” CTR or conversion rate is, and I get it. Benchmarks are comforting, but they shouldn’t be your focus. Even SaaS-specific conversion rates should just be an interesting comparison tool. The main metrics you should be comparing your emails against are your own. Look at how your exact audience responds to different types of emails or onboarding strategies, and try to increase rates over past performance. Basically, spend more time looking forward than to the side at competitors.
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Coming Soon - Onboarding Email Tools
Editing and Auditing Free Trial Emails
What if you’re reading this post, and you already have an onboarding email series in place. Do you just need to scrap it? No, no, no. I’m a big fan of working harder, not smarter. There are ways you can repurpose your emails to fit a shiny new strategy.
Check your strategy
Your strategy is the first place you should look when auditing your onboarding emails. After all, the strategy is the bedrock of the series. You could start by working through the onboarding email pyramid I showed up above. This would involve doing the work for each level, and then repurposing emails once you get to the writing phase.
Here’s a simplified checklist for auditing your onboarding email series in a jiffy:
Identify one goal for users to complete. Choose a quick-win that really packs a punch, or focus on a particular motivator.
Choose a building block. A “building block” is a step that new users MUST do. It’s either the first step that they can’t progress without doing or the “wow” step that gives them that quick-win. This feature or action will be your top priority.
Add two more actions. If your building block is the cake, what steps can be the icing? Make sure these actions, use cases, or features tie back to the one goal you’re focusing on.
Check email consistency. It seems to be more common for first-time onboarding email writers to err toward too little emails, as opposed to too many. You can definitely get by with a leaner series, but check to make sure there aren’t long gaps of silence in your current sequence.
Remind users about the trial end date. One of the easiest additions you can make to your free trial email sequence is reminder emails. Everyone has full lives, which means they aren’t tracking the end of each free trial they sign up for. If your trial doesn’t require a card on file to sign up, you need to send reminder emails. If you don’t, someone may forget to upgrade until after their account has been interrupted.
Check your emails
In addition to editing your email series strategy, you can also get in the weeds of individual emails. Here are a few questions to use to audit your emails:
Does it have a clear objective?
Is it customer-focused?
Is it attention-grabbing or memorable?
Does it make sense to people outside your company?
Is it unique?
Is it working?
As you evaluate each email, you’ll have three options of what to do next: keep, edit, or delete.
Keep the email if it fits in the strategy and passes the questions above.
Edit the email if it fits in your strategy but could use some clarification or a new spin.
Delete the email if it doesn’t work toward the main focus of the series and just adds noise.
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Coming Soon - Onboarding Email Experiments + Testing
SaaS Email Templates
Phew! You just made it through a ton of onboarding email information.
If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed by now, I have a treat for you. Three words: Onboarding. Email. Templates!
My guide Essential SaaS Email Series Templates has a sample onboarding email sequence that you can use to get you started. Using the templates means you need to make fewer decisions (like what type of email to send on which day), and there are prompts to kickstart writing.
There’s a section for onboarding as well as:
Cold emails
Lead nurturing
Engagement + Retention
Winback
