Email marketing for SaaS: Inspiration, strategies, and examples


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January 23, 2025
Written by
Julie Griffin
Contributor
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If you’re a marketer who has recently found themselves in the complex world of SaaS email marketing, or you’re looking for a refresher on strategies and best practices, then this article is for you.

Email marketing for SaaS is typically more complicated than other industries because there is so much data to leverage. The data is (generally) a blessing as it enables you to create robust email marketing cadences and campaigns that can better engage your audience. But, it can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re starting from square one.  

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the what, where, and how, of email marketing in SaaS, and give you the inspiration and steps you’ll need to develop your email marketing program. 

Why email marketing works for SaaS

Email marketing may not be the newest, most exciting marketing channel in 2025, but there’s a reason we’re all using it—it works. With an ROI of $36 for every $1 spent, it’s why SaaS businesses often turn to email marketing to help them engage and nurture customers across the funnel. 

  • Email usage: People regularly use emails. Whether for work or our personal lives, we’re constantly communicating via email. The direct one-to-one communication style allows companies to educate and provide information regarding the product’s value propositions at each stage of the customer lifecycle. 

  • The SaaS model: Software as a Service (SaaS) companies generally use a subscription or freemium model. This model requires consistent nurturing to keep potential customers engaged and move them through the different pricing tiers. Email is the best channel to consistently educate and nudge customers through the pipeline, helping to onboard new customers and retain existing customers. 

  • Data: The data-rich nature of SaaS applications means there’s a lot of information that can be pulled into email sequences to create personalized email campaigns. By tracking user behavior, feature adoption, and engagement metrics, companies can trigger relevant email communications that aren’t possible in other industries. 

How to build an email marketing program for SaaS

Creating your email marketing program will look a bit different for each SaaS organization. For example, a B2B SaaS company will have a different customer lifecycle than a B2C SaaS organization. Use these guidelines to help you get started, but tweak them for your own business and use cases. 

1. Map out your customer lifecycle stages

From awareness to conversion through ongoing retention, outline your customer lifecycle stages. From there, identify the key transition points where email communication can move prospects to the next stage. For example, the journey might include: newsletter subscriber → free trial user → paying customer → power user → advocate.

2. Build a high-quality email list

Use lead magnets, like ebooks, webinars, and free trials, as well as newsletter subscriptions to attract your ideal customer. Confirm your email subscriptions with a double opt-in to make sure your contacts are interested in receiving information from you. 

3. Understand what data is at your disposal

Just because you have a lot of data, doesn’t mean it’s easy to use or easy to incorporate into your email program. Work with your data analytics team to determine what data can be leveraged within an email program. 

4. Segment your audiences 

You mapped out your customer lifecycle earlier, but how can you break it down even further? Do you have different product lines? Are customers in different locations around the world?

With the available customer data, segment your audience, grouping customers by location, industry, product interest, or other demographics or user behavior. 

5. Develop email sequences

With your infrastructure in place and data at your fingertips, it’s time to develop distinct email sequences or drip campaigns for each stage. Here are a few examples of sequences you could develop:

  • Welcome series that focuses on establishing credibility and educating your potential customers

  • A trial campaign that educates users on different features, helping them become familiar with the product

  • Post-conversion emails that highlight advanced capabilities and encourage platform usage

6. Analyze, iterate, repeat

There is no setting and forgetting when it comes to email campaigns. As you send out your drip campaigns, analyze the data and review what topics contacts are engaging with. Use our email metrics guide to help you measure email performance. 

Essential email marketing strategies for SaaS

With your campaigns set up, let’s talk about how you can further optimize your email program to make it easier to scale and develop engaging emails that turn leads into customers.

Marketing automation

Scaling your email efforts isn’t possible without marketing automation. You can set up emails that are triggered to send based on user behaviors, such as specific user actions or inactions with your platform. You could, for example, send a congratulatory email when a user achieves a milestone with your platform, or trigger a re-engagement email if they have used your software for a period of time.

Hyper-personalization

We’re far beyond the days of adding a recipient’s name to an email. Hyper-personalization leverages a lot of the data at your disposal, such as a user’s role, industry, usage patterns, and success metrics, alongside predictive analytics. This allows you to tailor each email communication so that it feels like a personalized, one-to-one experience. 

Segmentation

Beyond basic demographic information, you can use segmentation to track product usage patterns, feature adoption rates, and engagement metrics. This data will power your personalization efforts and help you identify potential customers as well as customers about to churn. 

Balance educational and promotional content

Constant promotional emails lead to unengaged subscribers who will unsubscribe, or worse, mark your content as spam. Instead, provide value to your contact base through educational content. This could be through newsletters, guides, or webinars, but the educational content should not be product-specific. Instead, it should provide broader industry information that helps the user become more familiar with the specific nuances of your industry. 

A/B testing

A/B testing should be ongoing to optimize your email performance. Test subject lines, send times, content length, CTAs, and other variables. Focus on metrics that matter most for each campaign type, such as open rates for newsletters, click-through rates for feature announcements, and conversion rates for upgrade promotions.

SaaS email marketing examples

Use the following SaaS email marketing examples to get your wheels turning and inspire your campaigns. 

SaaS educational emails

Before your contacts become customers, educational content can increase familiarity with your industry while reminding contacts of your expertise and credibility.

The emails below from Twilio Segment and Crowdstrike both provide ebooks for contacts to download. In these emails, the companies aren’t promoting products but showcasing themselves as experts in their respective industries by sharing valuable information. 

Industry segmentation emails

After downloading a guide on nonprofit trends, Salesforce has continued to segment my information as part of the nonprofit industry, sending me related nonprofit resources and guides. 

With guides and other lead magnets, companies can request additional information such as industry, location, and phone number, giving your organization more clues about the contact’s interests. Using this information, you can better segment your email list and create highly engaging emails. 

SaaS welcome and onboarding emails

There’s often a learning curve with new software which is why it’s so important to provide onboarding information when someone signs up for your product.

This helps users familiarize themselves with the tools and makes it more likely that they’ll succeed in using the product.

In the examples below, Whimsical, an iterative workspace for product teams, offers a Whimsical Basics guide to help users get started. The email also provides a customer service email to reach out to with any questions. 

The following example with Linear, a product development planning tool, provides not only a guide to help users become familiar with how Linear works, it also provides information on they “Why” behind the Linear method. This helps users buy into Linear’s mission and what the company stands for. 

Platform usage update emails

Grammarly, a writing assistant that reviews spelling, grammar, and tone, provides a weekly writing update that shares your writing streak, productivity, as well as top mistakes, additional resources, and tips.

This subtly reminds users of how much they use Grammarly while celebrating the work they achieve each week. 

Master SaaS email marketing 

While more complex than other industries, SaaS email marketing offers so many opportunities to businesses. Plus, its data capabilities allow you to showcase how valuable email is at nurturing and converting leads into customers.

To dive deeper into the nuances of email marketing, explore the following resources:

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