From social media campaigns to paid ads and influencer marketing — there are multiple ways to reach your target audience. But there’s one strategy that stands most effective: Email marketing.
Email marketing is an incredible way to share your message, build customer relationships, and enhance engagement with your brand. In fact, research shows that 90% of customers prefer to receive brand updates via newsletters, while 10% prefer updates on social media. Further, McKinsey & Company found that emails are 40 times more successful at acquiring new customers than either Facebook or Twitter.
A SaaS newsletter is an email that offers subscribers insights about your content, announcements and promotions, builds brand authority, and helps you better communicate with subscribers at every stage of their customer journey.
Since an average person checks their email 15 times per day or every 37 minutes, these can provide SaaS businesses endless opportunities to get their content, products, and services in front of the audience.
In this blog post, we’ll delve into everything you need to know about creating an interactive and beautiful newsletter for your SaaS brand.
You might invest a lot of time and money in writing a SaaS newsletter. But, how do you ensure you’re delivering the right message to the right people at the right time?
Knowing your target audience is the foundation of creating a successful SaaS newsletter. This means understanding your ideal subscribers and what they want to know more about.
Here’s how you can do it:
The above strategies can make your SaaS newsletters more engaging and help guide you towards what topics and content types you should include in your newsletters.
No matter what you’re going to include in your SaaS newsletter, the majority of your subscribers will be interested in how valuable and relevant it is to them. Deliver useless or promotional content, and you’ll likely lose subscribers and damage your brand reputation and growth opportunities.
If you need ideas to keep your SaaS newsletter fresh and relevant, consider these tips:
Here are a few types of content you can include in your SaaS newsletters:
Consistency is another crucial factor in creating a SaaS newsletter that users will be excited to open and read. It doesn’t matter how many newsletters you send per week or month. What really matters is consistency.
Your subscribers should know the exact day when your newsletter will land in the inbox. If you send your newsletter four times in the first month and disappear for the next three months, your open rate will fall dramatically when you restart.
On the other hand, being consistent enables your users to care more about your newsletter. Plus, you establish a connection with them, making them stick with you for a long time, and share your newsletter with their peers and colleagues.
Determine how often and when you will send your newsletter, and stick to it. Many SaaS businesses don’t create a newsletter unless they have significant news to share. Avoid this approach as it allows too much time for your subscribers to forget about you and your work.
Also, remember that consistency and quality matter more than frequency. Even if you deliver one newsletter per month, make it packed with content that your audience will find valuable. Create a realistic publishing schedule that you know you’ll be able to follow. And, you can always increase your frequency as you go.
Design is the most overlooked component of a SaaS newsletter creation process. Optimizing the design of your newsletter is crucial as it can not only make it more attractive but also improve its readability and increase click-throughs and engagement. In short, your valuable content won’t matter if the design doesn’t make it accessible enough.
Nowadays, email marketers rely on well-designed templates for their SaaS newsletters to simplify the designing process. So, choose a template that adheres to your newsletter guidelines. Plus, you should be able to customize the template as much as possible to ensure it’s capable of achieving your goals.
In addition, incorporate these design elements to make your newsletter stand out:
Creating a must-read SaaS newsletter is tricky. Now that you’ve planned out its design, it’s time to make sure your newsletter has these five components:
Subject line
Even if people sign up for your newsletter, there’s no guarantee they’ll open it once they receive them. This is where writing an interesting subject line helps.
The subject line is undoubtedly the most crucial part of your SaaS newsletter. It is the first piece of information your subscribers see which determines whether or not they will open your email. If it’s not enticing enough, they will just ignore it, and all the time spent on crafting your newsletter will go to waste. In fact, 69% of email subscribers report email as spam based on subject lines alone.
Here’s what you can do to craft click-worthy subject lines:
Preview text
Preview or preheader text is the snippet of the email content that subscribers can see before reading the whole SaaS newsletter. Basically, it is the extension of your subject line that teases the reader about the newsletter’s message. Done right, it can have a powerful impact on your open rates.
Some tips for writing effective preview texts are:
Main body
Next comes the main body of your SaaS newsletter. It provides an overview of different topics at once. So, it’s important to break it down into separate sections for each subject. Even though each section is about a different topic, they’re unified under a common theme. This way, your subscribers can quickly scan your content for the details that attract them.
Naturally, the newsletters are longer than sales emails. Some studies say that newsletters with 50 to 200 words have the best click-through rates. However, we recommend considering your readers’ habits to determine the correct length. For example, busy working moms don’t have much time to spare, and therefore, cannot read long newsletters. But, SaaS marketers may prefer a long weekly digest.
Whatever length you choose, make sure the newsletter is as crisp as possible but also contains everything you need to convince the reader to take an intended action.
Research about your audience to see what topics might interest them. Include relevant and credible links from blogs, highlight company events and webinars, and provide free resources. Further, avoid filling your newsletter with too many ads unless you want it in the trash.
Take Morning Brew’s Newsletter as an example. This newsletter takes the prize for converting the most topics in a single mail. The best thing? All topics are organized under specific sections, without confusing the readers. Plus, it mentions multiple article links and explains their relevance before clicking them.
Call-to-action (CTA)
You might have created a fabulous newsletter with valuable information and a beautiful design. But, if it doesn’t guide the reader towards the next steps, it’s a dead end. This is where a call-to-action (CTA) comes into play.
A CTA is a button or hyperlinked word or phrase that prompts a user to take the desired action, such as visiting a blog, watching a video, filling a form, and so on. These simple yet powerful buttons are the difference between good newsletters and great ones. Plus, it ensures an ongoing interaction between the SaaS brand and the consumer.
Follow these tips for effective CTAs:
For example, Airtable uses a subtle way to draw your attention to their CTA button. Plus, both the graphic and the CTA button link to the same video.
Footer
An email footer is the last and most overlooked component of a SaaS newsletter. However, it’s as essential as the beginning because it contains plenty of information about your brand that can direct your readers towards the intended action. In short, they improve the quality of interaction with your brand.
Here’s what a footer should include:
Take a look at this email footer of Zapier’s newsletter:
Imagine you’re selling plane tickets to Paris. Sure, you’ll tell them about the flight details and the price. But, what will win people over and excite them are the photos of the beautiful cafes, museums, and the famous Eiffel Tower.
That’s exactly what images can do for your SaaS newsletter. They support your message and help your subscribers connect with your content — making your writing more impactful and boosting your click-through rate. Visually-enhanced newsletters also enable your readers to understand your product and brand better.
So, make sure not to keep your newsletters text-heavy and strategically place images, infographics, videos, and charts.
Here are some best practices:
Check out the different types of images used in this newsletter by Monday.com.
You’ve worked so hard to design and create content for your newsletter — came up with a powerful copy, an engaging subject line, and a strong CTA. And yet, why do your emails still have a low open or click-through rate? It might be that your timing is not correct.
People receive hundreds of emails every day, and the ones at the top of the inbox get better engagement than those at the bottom. Therefore, sending your SaaS newsletters at the right time is just as important as its content and design.
A badly-timed email will lose its value and will likely be ignored by your subscribers for other newsletters. On the other hand, sending them at the right time can boost your open rates and click-throughs as your readers will likely see and open them.
But, what is the right time to send a newsletter? How can you find the right time that aligns with your newsletter strategy? Consider these tips:
When choosing the best day to send newsletters, do some A/B testing on your list. Come up with some hypotheses based on engagement data, open rates, and click-through rates. Whatever day you select, make sure to send your newsletter at the same time. This builds trust and makes your audience expect your content at the same time.
Earlier, people used Excel sheets connected with Outlook to manage their subscriber list and send emails. But today, it no longer cuts the mustard — you need something more efficient to streamline your newsletter strategy.
This is where newsletter software comes into play.
A newsletter platform enables you to write, design, and send SaaS newsletters to a group of people and manage subscribers, measure performance, and more. It comes with many features such as A/B testing, smart content, analytics, and customizable templates.
However, not all newsletter platforms are the same. Ultimately, you need to select the one that aligns with your unique needs. Here are a few factors you must consider:
Some of the best email newsletter tools are Mailchimp, Sendinblue, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, and Constant Contact.
Creating a good first impression is highly crucial in email interactions. A welcome email can go a long way here.
Welcome emails are sent to new subscribers to introduce what your brand is all about and how often you’ll be in touch. In fact, 74% of the email subscribers expect a welcome email. So, make sure you send it to make your newsletter stand out and boost subscriber engagement naturally.
Since it’s your first interaction with your readers, use it to show your personality and make them feel that there’s a real person behind the brand. You can give some juicy content upfront, so your readers don’t have to wait. Plus, you can use it to tell them how to whitelist your emails, leading to the delivery of your newsletter right in their inbox folder.
Here’s what you can include in your welcome email:
Check out this welcome email by Later:
An email newsletter is a fantastic SaaS marketing strategy for engaging with your prospective customers and persuading them to take the desired action. If you’re not already taking advantage of its power, you’re losing a huge opportunity to foster a relationship with your audience and build brand authority.
But an unattractive SaaS newsletter won’t grab anyone’s attention, while an organized one can boost your revenue, drive more people to subscribe to your mailing list, and ensure steady traffic influx to your website and social media channels.
Once your newsletter is ready, spend some time testing it. Send it to a colleague who can give you helpful feedback. Further, check it on a desktop and a mobile screen to ensure the design works flawlessly on all devices.
Let's find out if we're the SaaS content marketing company you’re looking for.