SaaS onboarding emails are an opportunity for your company to communicate the value of your product to new users who sign up for a free trial. These emails help users experience your product more efficiently while building a positive, long-term relationship with your brand.
Every user signs up with a unique motivation or need. The more you understand about your customers "what and why" the more effectively you can tailor your onboarding messages.
This is where the value of product analytics comes into play - Product analytics plays a major role in this process. Gathering and analyzing customer data enables you to refine your SaaS onboarding email strategy over time. This approach improves conversion rates, user satisfaction, and overall customer success.
By combining these insights with channel data, you can craft onboarding messages that truly resonate with your users and drive stronger engagement.
With so many strategies to choose from, it can be challenging to know where to start. Here are proven best practices for creating high-performing onboarding emails.
We’ve got you covered;
1. Know your customer journey. Ask yourself: in a perfect world, what are the exact steps users would take to complete onboarding? Shape your messaging around these actions to help users experience your product’s core value as quickly as possible. Understanding your customer’s journey at its core is what will enable you to really get into the mind of your users, and understand what help they need to experience the value that they want to experience from your product.
2. User segmentation.This is where having a deep understanding of how users interact with your product comes into play. You can segment your users in order to send them emails that align with their priorities and specific interactions with your product or app, guiding them toward completing the next step necessary to finish onboarding or integrate your product into their daily routine.
3. One CTA at a time. Keep it simple; you don’t want to overwhelm or confuse new users by trying to get them to accomplish multiple tasks in the span of one message. As a general rule of thumb, include only one call-to-action per onboarding email. Remember, small victories will always lead to big victories. Also, for onboarding emails, the purpose of the CTA is not only to convert but also to make it clear what the next step is for the user to reach their goal. When phrased that way, users are more likely to engage.
4. Make it personal.The best SaaS onboarding emails are the result of extensive research and time invested in getting to know your customers.
What role does the user play in their company?
What unfulfilled need led the user to search for your product?
What value is the user looking to receive from your product?
What motivates the user to interact with your product?
What does success or satisfaction look like to the user?
These are all questions that you and your marketing team should dive into and have answers for each customer who signs up for your product.
To curate the language of your SaaS onboarding emails so that they speak directly to your user’s wants and needs, you can ask website visitors questions like: “What brings you to our site today?” or “How can we help you get started?”
This is a quick and efficient way to learn about your customers directly from the source. Even if you aren’t able to ask everything from day one (it could put some people off and affect your sign-up process), you can build this knowledge gradually.
Preparation is key to building a successful onboarding email strategy. To create a solid foundation that allows you to implement onboarding emails with ease, plan your email strategy with the following key elements.
Identify goals, big and small. It’s important to map out all of the goals a user will want to achieve with your product so you can encourage them along the way to complete onboarding.
Remember, you want them to finalize onboarding before the free trial period is over. You don’t want to overwhelm users with long-term goals they won’t likely see results from in a one- or two-week period.
Instead, focus on enabling them to experience the value of your product at least once and achieve smaller goals that provide immediate gratification.
Once they get a taste of your product’s value, they’ll want to keep exploring and come back for more.
2. Understand the true impact of emails on onboarding. Benchmark your email metrics; tracking open, click-through, and conversion rates over time will help measure the progress of your email strategy.
According to a study conducted by HubSpot, here are the SaaS industry’s average email marketing benchmarks:
Open rates: 20%
Click-through rates: 7.18%
Hard Bounce rates: 0.8%
Unsubscribe rates: 0.5%
While these metrics are easy to check, they only tell part of the story.
Your main goal is to write and send emails that have a positive impact on customer success—helping finalize onboarding, increasing retention, and improving satisfaction.
Use a product analytics tool to dig deeper and determine which emails perform best.
To understand the true impact of your email strategy on onboarding, you need to dig deeper and use a product analytics tool.
You’ll soon discover which emails are successful, which emails have no impact, and which emails have a negative impact (you read that right; we’ve seen scenarios where the onboarding rate of the users who didn’t open an email was higher than the one for the users who did open the email).
If you are a B2B SaaS company, it’s essential to conduct the analysis at the account-based level. If one team member started the onboarding, and another team member finished it, you have a 50% onboarding rate instead of 100% for this account.
Image caption: InnerTrends report: Impact of emails on onboarding rates
But as we just said, all of this data can and should be used to your advantage, because with it you can improve your SaaS onboarding emails’ language and strategy to better fit the needs of your users.
3. Timing, timing, timing. One question we hear often is: “When is the best time to send new users an onboarding email?” The best times (and messaging strategies) for sending onboarding emails to your users can be determined using a product analytics tool.
A product analytics tool can average the amount of time it takes your users to complete the onboarding process while also highlighting the outliers (users who take significantly longer to complete onboarding). With this knowledge, you can strategically send out emails at the time that will best encourage your outliers to finish the onboarding while avoiding disturbing the users who finished at the average rate.
Image caption: InnerTrends report: How long does it take accounts to finish onboarding?
4. Complement other actions that improve UX. Complement other actions that improve UX. It seems obvious, but we have to point it out. Your product has to perform well and be easy to use for your SaaS onboarding to be successful. If it doesn’t, you’ll lose the interest of your users and they’ll quickly forget about your product.
A product analytics tool will also help discover if you have a UX problem and understand where people drop off during onboarding.
You can fix UX problems in several ways: redesigning the product, adding an in-app guide, or helping guide your prospects and customers with, well, emails.
It’s time to take a look at a few SaaS onboarding emails being put into practice. Use these as a springboard for your product’s SaaS email marketing strategy.
The “Welcome” Email
Ah yes, the classic onboarding welcome email. Don’t sleep on the welcome email; this is the first encounter a new user has with your product, so it typically has the highest open rate. If you win them over here, they’re more likely to open future emails.
The welcome email should be kept simple by greeting the user, sharing what the user can expect, and highlighting the next step the user needs to take to move forward with your product.
Trello’s onboarding “Welcome” email is a great example. Take a look:
2.The “Next Steps” Email
Be wary of overwhelming your users if the “next steps” for your product setup lean toward the more complicated side. However, if the steps are simple and easy to accomplish in one sitting, users will feel immediate gratification from achieving these small goals.
Bitly does a really nice job of incorporating the next steps while keeping it simple:
3. The Reward Email
The Reward Email
Reinforcing good habits with positive gratification will encourage users to take further steps. It also acts as a fun way to reinforce the value that your product is delivering to the user, directly stating what they’ve accomplished as a result of the actions they’ve performed.
Ascend by Wix has a really fun example of this.
4. The Call To Action Email
Call-to-action emails are effective when they’re kept simple. Like we said earlier, if you give just one call to action per SaaS onboarding email, your users won’t feel overwhelmed or confused as to what step they need to take next. Instead, they’ll know exactly what to do next and receive value from continuing the setup.
Airtable’s CTA email is simple yet effective.
5. The “Getting to Know You” Email
This email is where you can get to know your users and get down to the nitty-gritty of why each individual user has sought out your product. This email can also show your users that you appreciate their input and are always looking to improve your product to cater to their needs.
Otter’s “Getting to Know You” email conveys this message perfectly.:
SaaS onboarding emails are an excellent opportunity to get to know your users, support them along their journey to completing onboarding, and reinforce the use of your product as part of their daily routine.
The gathering and analyzing of customer data and insights through product analytics is your greatest asset in building a successful SaaS onboarding email strategy. With a powerful email marketing tool like SendX, you can get started with SaaS onboarding emails at no cost today. Once you’re all set up with the emails and start to get leads via onboarding during the welcome sequence, you can use product analytics tools to measure their impact on your overall conversions.
