3 Ways To Drive Product Adoption For SaaS With Drip Campaigns

Even in 2022, email marketing remains an important and reliable channel for SaaS companies looking to drive product adoption via converting and engaging customers. Email offers many different opportunities to connect with your customers but the way in which these are implemented will have to determine on the profile of customers and the expected results.

Broadly speaking, the key goals of email drip campaigns are generally to increase conversions or to help drive retention via engagement with customers. The end result of that engagement may vary from simply building awareness of your company and product to reminding users that you are available to support their needs. In this series, we provide some tips for how to set up drip campaigns to help drive these results.

A Welcome Email Drip Campaign To Drive Activation Events

Any onboarding process can benefit from a well designed welcome email drip campaign. This may seem obvious but there are a number of nuances we will flag to help you derive more value from this.

It is important to be clear what the goals of an email drip campaign is. For most recipients this may be the first point of contact they have with your company and thus is an important chance to make a winning first impression. They will be more receptive to the email and this is likely to have the highest open rates. Accordingly, this is also a great chance to direct users to activation events and display the value of your SaaS. Both of which are critical to helping drive product adoption.

Rather than just greeting your users, compel them to take action whatever form that takes. This may mean directing them to their first login or making their first purchase. You are looking to immediately drive them to the most obvious and immediately valuable Ah-Hah moments in the initial welcome email.

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An example is Loom, a screen recording SaaS, that sends a welcome email introducing some of the more indepth features and benefts of a paid subscription plan. They also drive web application logins via use of a call to action to “Go to your Workspace”. This leads users to login to their web application where they will be given an onboarding tour with the application itself.

In follow up emails, you can direct users to more complex activation events, support resources (FAQs, Office hours, Video guides) or case studies of usage to flesh out the possibilities of your SaaS platform.

Celebrating Your Customer’s Major Milestones

You may want to set up regular emails with your customers to update them on their progress towards a milestone. This helps keep them engaged as the progress that each customer makes is personalized and is about their own milestones of usage.

Some milestones of usage are as follows. For consumer SaaS this may be things like how many purchases they made for an ecommerce platform or tasks completed for a task management platform. For enterprise SaaS this may relate to activation events for their individual user but also organisation wide statistics on usage. In particular activation events that crystalise Ah-Hah moments are important to flag.

You can also utilise these emails to lay out further milestones for users or offer more options for users based on their usage. This may mean introducing a new feature which can help with stickiness. Alternatively, this may also mean a cross selling or upselling opportunity.

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Coursera, an eLearning application, sends out congratulatory messages for course completion. The email also includes a call to action which drives users to carry on with further courses that enable a user to earn specific credentials. These can later be listed on Linkedin.

Re-Engagement Email For Those Dropping Off

Churn is a major metric to track for every SaaS solution and reducing churn is an important goal. One way to help reduce churn is via emails that have been specifically set up to target at risk customers. The exact metrics for how to determine who these customers are may differ greatly. It may be about engagement with prior emails in terms of open rates or clickthrough rates. It may relate to a 360 Customer Health Score or recent NPS survey results.

Either way, keep an eye on your desired metrics and when it is required send a re-engagement email that they find compelling enough to open and act upon. Many companies offer some kind of a deal to grab the attention of their disengaged recipients. Discounts can be a great way to capture their attention. Other possible means of engagement may be by offering value added services such as a free consultation or by involving them in your marketing activities through customer features or podcast interviews.

Since these are customers are at risk of dropping out it is important to treat them as if you are once again in the act of conversion and win them over again from a first principles approach. There is literally no downside to emailing these customers. In the worst case scenario, they will simply unsubscribe from your emails which they would already have done in any case. This leaves your team to focus on those who there is still a chance of winning back.

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Xero, a accounting platform, offers a discount to users as part of their campaign to reengage inactive accounts and drive conversion. In this case, the discount is tagged to a 11.11 deadline for signup which helps create a sense of urgency and pushes users to act immediately.

Conclusion

The format and content of your own emails will vary substantially but we hope these have given you some ideas for how you too can utilize email drip campaigns to drive product adoption for your SaaS solutions. Once you have laid out your plans and copywriting, it then becomes a matter of establishing the right triggers and automating the sending. Do keep an eye on your engagement results and frequent AB testing of copywriting may be required but eventually you will have the perfect drip campaign(s) set up to win customers and create adopters.

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Usertip is a digital adoption platform designed to help scale your onboarding, training and support for digital solutions. Our no-code platform delivers in-application walkthroughs directly on your digital solutions. Seamless user experience and on-demand learning are all delivered to your user’s fingertips within seconds. Click here to find out more.