The Ultimate Guide to B2B SaaS Email Marketing

Start with the list of potential customers

The first step to set up your B2B SaaS email marketing engine is building your audience list. Defining the target audience for email marketing efforts is as crucial as building the list itself, if not more. ue, etc.

If you don’t define your audience correctly, you will end up targeting the wrong people with your emails, and will not see sufficient ROI from the email channel. As we discussed previously, these lists will be different for your inbound email marketing and outbound email marketing efforts.

Inbound emails will go to subscribers who have specifically “opted-in” to receive communications from your company whereas outbound emails will go to “prospects” whom you have deemed to be the right fit for your company. For the purpose of this article, we will talk about building your list for outbound marketing efforts, as that’s more critical to SaaS organizations.

There are numerous ways to legally gather contact information for your outbound email efforts, the most popular one being via contact databases. Popular options like Zoominfo, Data.com, Neverbounce, and Apollo.io supercharge your email marketing efforts by connecting you to your potential buyers. They don’t just stop at providing email addresses—but even clean your email lists, verify contact information, and in some cases, integrate directly with your CRM to import other information such as prospect title, company, industry, company size, company revenue, etc.

Email Warmup

If your organization is new to B2B email marketing, especially cold outreach and outbound emails, we suggest starting with an exercise called “warming up” your email account. Email warm up is a term used to describe the exercise of establishing trust and reputation for a new sender email account before engaging in cold outreach.

Verkada, a Series C security startup, is one company that’s taking this to heart. The email below came from their domain “verkadasecurity.io” and redirects to their homepage “verkada.com” where the sender (Monica) is a member of their sales team.

If you marked this email as spam, you might affect deliverability for that Verkada domain (and the sales accounts associated with it, i.e. verkadasecurity.io), but their core domain won’t be affected. This prevents emails to customers, investors, or even internal team members from going to spam.

If you skip the email warmup step, it affects your email deliverability rates and causes the majority of the emails sent through this account to end up in the recipient’s spam folder, thanks to Google’s spam update. The email warmup process is fairly straightforward—you have to start by sending a few emails each day—we suggest no more than 20-30 to begin with, and then gradually increase this number after a few days. Approximately, it takes about 8-12 weeks for your email account to reach its maximum deliverability potential so we suggest taking it slow in the first few weeks.

How to segment your email lists

Once you have built your email list, it’s time to move on to segmenting the master list into smaller ones.

If you too are plagued with the question how to personalize b2b emails—segmentation is your answer. Segmentation makes it easier for you to personalize your outreach at scale. This is a really crucial step in B2B SaaS email marketing as it categorizes and groups your audience based on commonalities they share. In fact, 72% of tech companies are segmenting emails, according to  Kiwi Creative’s 2021 Tech Marketing Survey.

There is no one way of segmenting your audience. Some companies do it by job title, some do it by demographics, others may do it by pain points or average revenue or company size. It depends on your message and what’s the goal of your campaign. The more data you have on your prospects, the more filters you can create when segmenting your lists and the more targeted you can get with your outreach.

THE Subject Line

Subject lines are like the gift wrapping of your email—for recipients to get excited about what’s inside and open the email, your wrapping needs to pique their interest.

The trigger or the hook

A typical B2B email structure should start with an intro sentence that immediately explains why you reached out and answer the question “what’s in it for you”.
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We also call this the “hook” of the email, something that captures the reader’s attention right away by mentioning the value that you're adding. The opening should be personalized, very specific to the reader and should create trust.

Still need more examples to help make the concept of the “trigger” clear? Let’s take a look at this email from ecommerce helpdesk Gorgias:

As you can see, the Gorgias team has done their homework about the prospect as the email drives straight into the pain point of the reader, i.e. getting repetitive support requests. This not just helps in establishing relevance but also makes the sender look like a trusted party, someone who understands the problems of the reader. The best hooks are the ones that invoke the feeling of “they know who I am and what I deal with” in the mind of the prospect, and this email from Gorgias does just that.

The Bridge

Once your opening sentence has done its job and hooked the reader, the next part of your email should build on top of the pain point and connect it to your company. This creates space for naturally introducing your offering into the conversation, without making the transition look forced or sales-heavy.

Taking the same pain point example as the previous section, let’s look at how a SaaS company selling a product to help customers reduce time spent on admin work can create a bridge between the trigger and their company.

The Ask

Every email should end with a CTA and should ideally be focused on inciting only one action. Call-to-Action or a CTA is the “ask” you have from the reader who is reading your email.

Reply Management

If nobody is monitoring the responses your email got, is there even a point to sending out those emails?

Reply management is a critical part of the B2B SaaS email marketing strategy, especially when sending outbound emails, as it has an immediate impact on your speed-to-lead.

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Here are some practical tips for becoming better at reply management:

Automate

Set up reply-mail-management with configured match-action rules that help you automate responses to specific types of replies—such as an out-of-office reply, auto-reply, or unsubscribe/do-not-contact requests. This is especially helpful for filtering out messages from your warming tool, which typically contain a token (see below).

Analyzing and Reporting on Performance

Email is a highly measurable channel if you use the right email marketing platform and especially, if you integrate CRM with email marketing.

Of course, as Devin rightly says, for both these approaches to work, you need to know your prospects really well. If they don’t care about the value proposition you mention in the tactical subject line or the topic you tried to invoke curiosity around in the mystery subject line, they won’t make any difference.

Primary metrics are open rates, click rates, reply rates, and unsubscribes. They help you understand how the recipients of the email are reacting to the content shared in the email.

For example:
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Your open rates are an indicator of how effective your subject line was and if the recipients trust you as a sender.

Your click rates show the message you shared in the email resonated with them and they were interested in learning more about your company.

Your reply rates indicate what percentage of the list was interested in having a conversation with you while your unsubscribe rate shows what part of the list did not find your email helpful and decided they don’t want to hear from your company again.

Tracking all these primary metrics will help you understand how well your email is being received by the audience and make tweaks to future campaigns.