We asked 9 SaaS companies for their best tips on email marketing, here’s what they said

We’ve been busy surveying some of the hottest software companies out there, asking them what their biggest email marketing tips and tricks are. We were eager to know the things they have learnt through years of experimentation, research and trial and error and they didn’t disappoint us with their responses!

Below we’ve broken down what each of the companies do and what their major pieces of email marketing advice are. There’s a gold mine of advice below so be sure to read to the end!

1) SEMRush

SEMRush allows you to analyse your own or your competitors digital marketing performance with exceptional detail. The software allows you to analyse SEO, paid traffic, social media as well as content PR.

The team over at SEMRush really put their heads together. Yury Kanuka, Nadezhda Zinoveva and Irena Smirnova got back to us with the detailed response below when asked what their major email marketing tips were;

• Collect and analyse any user feedback you receive. To know what our users actually think of emails they get from us, we added this special unit. By clicking on each face, users let us know how they feel about certain emails. We also have a feedback form where you can leave us a comment, suggestion or just share your thoughts. Just remember, all feedback matters.

• Double check statistical significance in results of experiments. It gives a clear vision on how natural the result of an experiment is. Moreover, by paying more attention to statistical significance you can predict results in 95% of similar experiments.

• Use builders and ready-made templates to speed up your work. Don’t avoid these kind of helpers. There’s nothing wrong with re-using email templates, pictures and GIFs to speed up your workflow. To avoid brush-ups apply them for different segments and email types.

• Big names — Big subject line. The secret to engaging subject lines lies in big names, events and updates. We noticed that placing popular topics in subject lines can increase open rates and attract more users.

• Early mornings work best to create email layouts. Creating emails requires 100% attention to detail, otherwise, something might go wrong. Stick to early hours when you work on layouts or need to look through email content. This easy trick really works and can save you from awkward mistakes.

• Don’t forget about UTM parameters. UTM parameters in emails help to track the success of your email marketing efforts and show what users do on your website after they click-through from your emails.

2) Klipfolio

Klipfolio provides businesses with a real-time overview of how critical elements of their company are performing by letting them easily build their own personal dashboard that displays the metrics that are most important to them.

Philippe Gamache, Email Marketing Specialist at Klipfolio, provided us with the below super useful email marketing tips;

• Empathy. The growth of automation in B2B customer life cycles continues to distance the customer from the product. Marketers are forgetting that even though they are targeting other businesses, they are still talking to people. Focus on helping your subscribers instead of selling to them and give them content that they will want to share. Get rid of your old emails with standard sales tones and write with more empathy to achieve more of a service tone. At the end of the day, B2B or B2C, people don’t buy from businesses, people buy from people.

• Segmentation. This shouldn’t be new. Chances are your product appeals to a wide range of professionals who might not all share the same struggles. So instead of creating generic content and batch-and-blasting it to all your leads, separate your content into smaller specialised chunks that speak to the different pain points of your segmented leads. Use progressive profiling or behavioural data like page views and page source to segment your leads based on what personas they qualify for.

• Time to drop HTML (mostly). HTML doesn’t really belong in nurture emails anymore. Having a good-looking website is important but your main email marketing focus should be effectiveness. Something about rich text feels way more real to the reader. It is after all how most humans write emails to each other. Try to go for shorter emails, less formatting and get to the point.

3) Yumpu

Yumpu is a cloud-based platform that quickly and easily turns any static Word or PDF document into an online, interactive flip page publication in less than 2 minutes.

Here is what Isabelle from Yumpu had to say when asked for her biggest email marketing tips;

• The first impression is crucial. This is not only true for face-to-face situations but also for email marketing. You need to teach new users who you are, what they can expect from you and what they need to do next.

• A/B Test. We do a lot of A/B testing of our messages as there’s no one universal way of creating email messages that work/convert. Hence, the use of images or videos highly depends on the message itself. It is also important to consider that some email providers block images. This means that you need to design your emails so that they also make sense without the images.

• Keep subject lines diverse. With regards to subject lines, we use pretty much everything in our subject headings: personalization with someone’s name to make the reader feel special, questions, etc. In my opinion, it is very important to design them in a diverse and interesting way.

4) Adoreboard 

Adoreboard is emotion analytics software that identifies the feelings expressed and the topics driving those feelings for your or your competitor’s brands or products.

Here is the response from Lauren Harris from Adoreboard when asked for her biggest email marketing tips;

• Understand your audience and what they are most likely to read. It is important to tailor your content to best suit their interests. If your content interests them, they are more likely to engage with it. Whether that is click-through, complete a sale or read again.

• Keep content relevant and up to date. At Adoreboardwe use our emotion analysis tool Emotics to understand reactions to what is trending worldwide, therefore our emails are always fresh and topical.

• Don’t spam.  Avoid sending emails too often and ensure content is well written and engaging to avoid looking “spammy”.

5) CrazyLister

CrazyLister lets eBay business sellers create sleek, attractive and professional mobile responsive eBay listings in minutes.

When asked for his biggest email marketing tips, this is what Victor Levitin, CEO and Co-founder of CrazyLister, had to say;

• Make it personal. Don’t try to hide behind a big company appearance. There’s magic in phrasing your email in a friendly, personal, non-formal way and signing them off with your name, role and image! Put a human face to your business – people remember faces.

• Make people think. Ask questions in your subjects. i.e. “eBay is killing active content, are your listings ready for the change?”

• Always include a reminder of what your solution/service offers – you are focused on this all day every day. Your recipients interact with 10’s and 100’s brands a day!

6) LessAnnoyingCRM

LessAnnoyingCRM is a simple to use, affordable CRM tool made specifically for small businesses. The software includes only the most useful and most critically important features for small businesses and does away with the bloat.

Julia Zasso, CRM Coach at LessAnnoyingCRM, had these fantastic and thoughtful email marketing tips for us;

• Write a clear and concise subject line (about 40-50 characters). What is your email about and why should people open it? For example, if you’re sending tips related to your product, you can call your email “XYZ Tips: How to do ABC.” It says what the email is for and what they will learn if they open it.

• Proofread! This may sound like a no-brainer, but it is so important to sound professional via email. I proofread an email once in my email software of choice, once in a test email that is sent to me, and again the day before the email is sent out.

• Systematise your content production. This is something we are currently working on. Your content should be something that can run on its own without tedious manual input, and that you can change and optimise over time. Think of how you can create a system for generating content ideas, creating content, producing it, and getting it out to your readers.For example, maybe you use a survey to your customers to generate content ideas, and you write 3 short posts based on each survey including tips and tricks for using your product. Then, you send out each post in a newsletter. This is more sustainable than waiting for customers to reach out to you with feedback, and guarantees a steady stream of content as your business grows.

• Always look for ways to improve. Just because content is “working” and you are getting readers or subscribers or users (whatever your end goal is) doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. It is important to try new things and A/B test your content or marketing channels to see what can work even better.For example, you can try segmenting your newsletters and sending different kinds of readers different types of content. Or you can change the format of your newsletter and see if that gets more people clicking and reading. Brainstorm a list of A/B tests you’d like to run, and implement a new one every few months, or once you’ve gathered enough data to determine each change’s significance.

7) Funnel.io

Funnel.io gives you a complete, accurate and up to date snapshot of all your advertising activity and performance in one place. No more switching between dozens of tabs!

Juuso Lyytikka, Head Of Growth at Funnel.io, had these super helpful email marketing tips and advice for us;

The techniques used in emails varies a lot depending on the context. The tone of voice needs to be adjusted based on the relationship one has with the recipient. In my opinion, the most important things (rules of thumb) in email marketing is to:

• Keep it simple.

• Keep it short.

• Make sure the message is relevant/interesting for the recipient.

• Have a clear call to action.

• Set the right expectations (be honest about what you’re offering and what you are looking to achieve with your email).

The last one might be the most important one. By setting the right expectations you give the person whom you are contacting the possibility to decide for themselves whether what your offering is interesting and relevant or not. In case they think what you are offering is interesting, the last thing you want to do is to not meet their expectations when they take the next step (whatever the next step could be: visiting your website, booking a demo, calling a sales rep etc.). Aim always to exceed the expectations of your prospects.

BONUS TIP 1 – Further, another tip that I’ve read about, that should be very effective is to add a typo to your email. This gives the recipient a feeling of exclusivity because you’ve taken the time to write an email only for him/her. This learning can be applied in larger scale as well. Taking your time to do some research and creating highly relevant and personalised (position, industry etc.) emails will increase both your open rates and answer rates.

BONUS TIP 2 – And finally, telling a story is by far the most efficient way to capture the recipient’s attention. Rather than just telling recipients about the features your product has, underline the problem it solves. Prospects, in general, couldn’t care less about the features of your product, they are interested in how you can help them and how your product can make their lives easier.

8) Edgar

Edgar is a nifty little tool that lets you save your social media posts after posting them and lets you repost them at a later time, automatically.

Jen Carney over at Edgar has the below brilliant email marketing tips and tricks for us;

• Keep email subject lines under 40 characters. Most people open emails on their mobile devices – and email services like Gmail truncate (cut off) subject lines at right around 40 characters – which means the shorter and punchier your subject line, the better.

• Always check to see how your newsletter/post will render on mobile. Most ESPs have a feature that will let you see what it will look like on a smartphone or tablet. If they don’t, send a test to yourself and check on your mobile device.

• Always A/B test your campaigns. Send emails to a portion of your audience to identify the variation with the best open rate (testing headlines) or click rate (testing content engagement). Send the variation that performed better out to the rest of your list.

• Verify your sign-ups. If using a single opt-in, do an initial check on sign-ups for obvious misspellings. Anti-spam orgs and ISPs pay very close attention to bounce rates. A simple spelling check will prevent one of the leading causes of bounces.

• Take the time to segment your list. Segmenting lets you tailor your emails to customers who are interested in a particular product or feature, and increases your open rates.

9) Avocode

Avocode is a platform for designers and developers to share and inspect Photoshop and Sketch designs. It enables designers to accurately communicate and hand off their design specs to developers.

Matouš Roskovec, Creative Lead at Avocode, had the below super useful email marketing tips for us;

• • Subjects under 30 characters have the highest open rate.

• • The intro text that appears behind the subject in the e-mail client is also a great way to increase open rates.

• • If the email subject is the ice breaker in the communication, then the CTA is the first date. Therefore, subject and CTA messaging should be connected.

• • Use a redirect service for links. When you happen to screw up your link and your campaign has been already sent, you just change the target link in the link redirect tool and everything is fixed.

10) Deskera

Deskera is an all-in-one business platform for growing and running your business with integrated accounting, inventory, CRM, payroll, HRMS and a lot more.

Saurabh Srivastava at Deskera shared the following insights on email marketing with us;

• Emails with the “From” field displaying a person’s name have a higher open rate than emails from a generic From address – so if you’re sending emails using your company’s name, experiment with using a real person’s name instead.

• 6-10 words in the subject line get the highest open rates. However, usage of “Free”, “Help” or “Reminder” in subject lines reduced open rates by 15%.

• Using one emoji in the subject line improved open rates by 47%. However, the inclusion of more than one emoji saw a drop in the open rate.

• Personalised subject lines had 27% higher open rates. Using the subscriber’s first name in the subject line led to 17% higher open rates compared to using the full name.

• Text-only emails with an image of the person in the signature have better CTRs than text-only with no image or HTML emails.

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If you’ve read this far then we’re sure you don’t need us to tell you that you made the right choice, as now you’re armed with a full arsenal of email marketing tips and tricks that professionals at some of the hottest software companies have worked long and hard to discover.

We highly recommend you try out the tips you feel are most relevant to you and you feel are likely to make the biggest positive difference. And remember to start off by running small scale controlled tests to a portion of your subscribers before rolling out a tip across your complete list.