Email marketing in SaaS is a hard thing to figure out. What emails do you need to send? When and how often do you need to send them? What should the email subject say? How do you avoid getting into spam? How do you make people open and read the emails?
It’s been four years since we’ve added our first email follow-up to Jitbit Helpdesk. We’ve kept working on them ever since. In this guide, I want to share everything we know about SaaS email follow-ups. You will also find specific examples you can steal for your app right away.
Why do you need email follow-ups
Third-party tools vs. in-house solution
Avoid getting into spam
HTML email templates
Best time to send emails
How many emails should you send
Email metrics you should track
Types of email follow-ups
Key components of a great follow-up
Time-based follow-ups
Behavioral follow-ups
Personal follow-up
Resources
Why do you need email follow-ups
The purpose of email follow-ups is to bring your free-trial users back into the app and engage them. If your users sign up for a trial and you don’t contact them until the end, you’re leaving money on the table.
Email follow-ups are a great tool for reminding trial users about your existence. People have to deal with a lot of distractions and can forget that they’ve signed up for your app. You need to send them emails throughout their trial to keep them engaged.
Third-party tools vs. in-house solution
There are two ways you can go about implementing your email follow-ups: using one of the many third-party marketing automation platforms or building an in-house solution.
When we were starting out, there were few decent third-party apps and our budget was pretty tight. So, we decided to make our own tool (having good developers on the team helped a lot). The in-house tool offered us the flexibility we needed to start experimenting. However, this approach has drawbacks:
It takes a lot of effort to set up your mail server to get a good delivery rate. If you decide to go with your server, your emails will often get into spam. We’ll talk more about that later.
It’s hard to manage. Every time I need to remember when we send a particular email, I need to jump into the code and figure it out. We don’t have a fancy centralized dashboard to see what’s going on. Also, we can’t make changes to emails quickly.
Adding any reliable analytics to your emails is complicated. You will probably need to use a third-party app, like Litmus, which is pricey. You can try to use Google Analytics to track open rates of your emails, but in my experience it is clumsy and unreliable.
You can’t A/B test the emails. A/B testing emails is a tricky thing to do. Many marketing automation platforms do offer working solutions, but there is probably no way you can implement A/B testing on your own.
However, in-house tools have one advantage. The ability to run complicated SQL queries to get the recipients you need is invaluable. Setting up behavioral follow-ups like “haven’t logged in for the last two days” or “didn’t invite coworkers” can take a lot of effort if you’re doing it with a third-party tool. So, if you want to nerd out with your queries, consider building your own tool.
If we were to start doing email follow-ups now, I would go for a third-party tool. Most of them cost around $50 to get started, which will pay off quickly.
Here are the marketing automation apps we like:
Drip was made specifically for SaaS email follow-ups. It’s easy to use. Its new “workflows” feature is fantastic and fun. If I weren’t stuck with our in-house tool, I would move to Drip instantly.
Intercom is a full-stack marketing automation platform. It offers live chat, a help desk and lots more, including email automation. Choose Intercom if you need a fully featured solution, not just email follow-ups.
MailChimp’s intended purpose is to run email campaigns, but nothing is stopping you from using it for follow-ups. I’ve included it because it is the only app of the three that offers A/B testing. Also, it may be cheaper because it has a free plan.
Avoid getting into spam
If you decide to go with your tool and have your SMTP server sending emails, you will face the spam problem. Spam will hurt your delivery rate – that’s one of the most important metrics you have. If you send emails and they are not getting delivered, what’s the point?
You can skip this if you’re going with a third-party app.
Basecamp has a great article on avoiding SPAM and increasing delivery rate: Giving away the secrets of 99.3% email delivery. Three things from that article helped us immensely:
Setting up a valid SPF record is the most important thing you can do. SPF protocol has become a standard in fighting spam. It helps the receiving email server ensure that you – and not someone impersonating you – sent an email. So, if you’re going to send email from your domain, better set up an SPF record. You can Google a manual on how to do that for your hosting provider.
Configuring reverse DNS goes hand-in-hand with SPF. SPF won’t work without configured reverse DNS. It is also needed to ensure that the sender is real, and that no one is impersonating you. Again, you’ll need to consult with your DNS provider on how to do that.
Sign your emails with DKIM to increase your chances of getting into the inbox. It can be a bit complicated to implement. It’s optional, but you can look into this regardless.
Please refer to the article mentioned above for more information.
HTML email templates
You want your emails to look nice and pretty. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Email apps lag ten years behind web browsers for some reason. You still have to rely on tables and a bunch of dirty hacks for the layout.
I do not recommend doing it yourself. Fortunately, there are a lot of free ones you can use.
Campaign Monitor has 24 free HTML templates you can use, along with an excellent WYSIWYG builder. There is an option to download HTML when you finish.
I will also attach our template. It’s a simple single-column layout with an image header, a call-to-action button, and a footer. It’s about as simple as it gets, but it works for us.
It looks like this:
Download Jitbit’s HTML email template.
Best time to send emails
The guys from MailChimp wrote an excellent article on this topic: “Insights from MailChimp’s Send Time Optimization System.” Our data pretty much confirms their findings.
Do not send on weekends. No one reads their business emails on weekends. And when they get to work on Monday, your email will be buried in their inbox.
Avoid sending on Mondays. Due to the reason above, sending emails on Monday is not the best idea. People are busier than usual on Mondays.
Fridays are even worse. We see lower open rates on Fridays. MailChimp confirms: 
Send during the work day. The highest open rates, according to our research, happen around 10 AM. It drops significantly after 18 PM. Here is MailChimp’s data that confirms this: 
Your emails have the best chance of being opened and read if you send them during the work day mid-week.
How many emails should you send
You want to send as many emails as possible without being annoying. There is no magic number. The Jitbit trial lasts 21 days. We send six to eight follow-ups during that period – that’s one email every three days.
You can send more. I think that one email every two days is fine. I couldn’t find any research on this topic, so this is based on my personal experience.
You can keep adding follow-ups until you see your unsubscribe rate going up. I know that a lot of companies send one or more emails every day during the trial, but that is too much. The last thing you want is someone clicking “mark as spam” on one of your emails.
Email metrics you should track
Email analytics is not easy due to email apps security restrictions. There are three things you can track reliably and easy:
Unsubscribe rate – how many people unsubscribe before the end of your follow-ups sequence. If this number goes up, send fewer emails or add more value to them.
Open rate is a good indicator of how good your subject line and “from” name are. In other words, it shows how tempting it is to open and read your emails.
Click-through rate shows how good your call-to-action and email content is in general.
Types of email follow-ups
There are many types of emails you can use. You want to try different things to figure out what works for your product.
Time-based. An email you send once users reach some time milestone in their trial. “Welcome to the first day of your trial,” “You’re halfway through,” and “You have three days left” all fall into this category.
Behavioural. You send these emails depending on what users do or don’t do during the trial. Think of them as tutorials on the features you think are important to use to get the most out of your product. More on that later.
Educational. Something about the problem you help solve with your product. For example, we sell a help desk app, and we send our users articles on how to do customer support better.
Transactional. Anything from a user credentials reminder to daily status updates from your app can be used to grow your conversions. In fact, this is the most under-utilised category. Here is a great article from Vero: The Complete Guide to Transactional Email
Personal. An email sent from an actual person. Its purpose is to start a direct conversation with a potential customer. We have a great example of this later in this guide.
Different types of follow-ups work better for different products and industries. It’s a good idea to give them all a try.
Key components of a great follow-up
All our follow-ups, except one, follow these guidelines:
Each has a clear call-to-action. The big red button you’ve seen on the screenshot earlier. Having a call-to-action is crucial for getting results from your emails.
An auto-login link is included in every email. It lets users log back into the app without having to remember their URL, login or password.
The “from” name is always the same. It helps users identify who this email is from.
Our support email address is in the reply-to field. You always want users to be able to reply to you in case they have questions.
All links include utm-parameters so that we can track clicks.
Time-based follow-ups
The purpose of time-based follow-ups is to bring trial users back into your app and remind them of your existence. Here are all the time-based follow-ups we use.
Basic follow-up on the seventh day
Three days before the trial ends
The trial end
”Win back" follow-up 90 days after a trial has expired
Behavioral follow-ups
Behavioral follow-ups are emails you send based on users’ activity. You can use them to nudge users to do an important thing they need to do to get the most out of your app and eventually convert into paying customers.
These are pretty specific to our help desk app, but I’m sharing them in full for your reference.
When a user hasn’t logged in for two days after the sign-up
Asking them to invite coworkers
"Customize design" - to those who haven't
"Introducing automation rules" to those who hasn't tried
Automation Rules is a very powerful feature of our app, and we want to make sure users see it.
"Install widget on your website"
This is our newest follow-up. I wanted to experiment with having an image inside the email. My results are not final, but I’m pretty confident it increases CTR.
Personal follow-up
Now, last but not least, the only personal follow-up we have. I have an entire article about it: “A single most effective SaaS email follow-up you’re probably not using yet.” I really recommend that you read it.
Here it is:
We send this email 30 minutes after the trial sign-up. Note that it comes from me, Max, not from Alex. Unlike the other emails, this one is in plain text and looks like it was sent manually by a real person. All these things help differentiate this follow-up from the rest.
The purpose of this email is to start a conversation with potential customers. We were able to fix a bunch of things with our sign-up and onboarding process and engage a lot more users by answering their initial questions quickly.
This follow-up has a 15–20% response rate, which is crazy. I recommend that you steal it for your app.
Resources
Some extra resources on this topic I recommend that you read:
Just Good Copy – find more inspiration for your follow-ups
The 17 emails we send to engage customers, reduce churn & increase revenue from Baremetrics
Behavioral Emails That Keep Customers Coming Back (with Examples from My Inbox) from Unbounce
CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business – because you don’t want to break the law
MailChimp Blog has a ton of information about email
Autoresponders are Dead: 5 Types of Follow-up Emails from Lincoln Murphy