Categories
Marketing

How Top SaaS Companies Use Email Marketing

email-marketing-1024x432

Effectively using email to connect with your customers is an important part of being a SaaS company.

When someone signs up, you want to reach out to show off what your product can do, or tempt someone into upgrading to your premium service.

We know this all too well, and we know how difficult it can be.

With low open rates and even lower click through rates, email can sometimes seem like a daunting area to focus on.

This is why we conducted a study of how top SaaS companies approach their email marketing and sales.

In partnership with PersistIQ, we looked at the sales cycles and drip marketing techniques of 281 top SaaS companies, analyzing 1183 emails in the process.

We compiled all the emails into a searchable database at first but decided to make it a bit more user friendly for people to browse by turning it into the microsite Inside SaaS Sales.

You can hop on there to search by company and view their emails; analyzing their approach.

Our tip is to find a few companies like yours – i.e. with similar business objectives – and work out why they’ve created and structured their emails in the way they did.

But there’s only so much we can learn from one email at a time. What trends can we find in the data? What sales cycle takeaways do we have?

The key findings from analyzing 281 companies’ emails

Companies follow up for 9 days before stopping contact

Companies tend to be persistent. While avoiding sending emails on weekends, the average period of a sales cadence is 9 days – just short of two working weeks.

Some companies tended to stray quite a distance from this average. Salesforce, for example, took 1 month before giving up with their outreach. While a company like Slack, where each customer tends to be of less value to the business, hit the 9 day mark square on the head.

Companies send one email per day until the end of the cycle

In that opening flurry of emails, the SaaS company doesn’t want to overdo it and scare you the customer away, but they don’t want you to move on either.

Looking at the two previous examples, Slack send the first 4 emails over the first 5 days with the final email coming on the 9th day. That pattern of sustained outreach initially followed by quiet rare reminders is mirrored by Salesforce’s approach, even if their cadence is longer.

Salesforce send two emails a day for the first two days and one email a day for the following four days. The last email in their cadence comes over a fortnight after the penultimate.

This pattern can be seen across the data set and suggests that a sprint start is preferable to a balanced campaign.

65% of companies hand you over to an automated marketing campaign

Automation is huge at the moment, and not just in marketing.

We’re slowly walking into a world where computers are performing an increasing number of our tasks. In the report Four Fundamentals of Workplace Automation from McKinsey, they predict that 18% of a marketing executive’s working time could already be automated by existing commercially available technologies.

And that report is about 18 months old. Zapier have integrated with an extra 500 companies since then!

In our data, it is clear that though lots of companies use automated elements, many of them combine automated with manual. Both Slack and Salesforce send automated marketing email, but Salesforce have a person on hand to reach out to you too; using the double tap method to follow up on previous outreach as a warmer mechanism

Consider automation! All I’m saying…

Most SaaS companies have two sales contacts per lead

Typically a company will have two contacts and at least one of them will have a title which is geared toward bringing in new customers: Sales (35%), Business Development (18%), or Marketing (18%).

It’s not unusual, however, for a company to reach out from a different member of staff – something which puts a friendly face on the company. Like the CEO or Founders themselves (7%) or a Customer Success (6%) person.

This kind of internal branding could add a little more positive to the mix, maybe?

74% of companies don’t leave voicemails

If a company leaves voicemails, the sales cycle length is usually 160% longer.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise because voicemails are indicative of a high touch sales approach. This involves a lot more effort and a lot more commitment from your sales team.

Generally, a company like Slack has no interest in sending you voicemails. Yet, a company like Epicor – who provide serious industrial services in a high value specialized niche – knows that their market is smaller and each lead is super valuable.

It’s in their favor to leave voicemails where possible! (All voicemails we received are transcribed with the rest of the email data on the microsite)

MailChimp is the most common email marketing software

Used by 49% of the sample, Mailchimp is the faraway winner of the email marketing software battle.

Up in second place is Marketo at 21% with HubSpot biting at their heels on 19%.

The rest come in a little further behind with “other” coming before (in order) Eloqua, Tout, Sidekick, Pardot, Marketing Cloud, Sable, and Sendgrid.

Mailchimp is very easy to use and they’ve offered useful automation elements for a while now. It’s surprising to see how far ahead they were in terms of usage amongst industry leaders, but it’s a compelling sign for anyone searching for an email marketing tool.

Learn your techniques from the best

It’s very easy to write an article online about how you should approach your email marketing.

You’ve probably read loads of these articles. I know I have.

But often these articles are written without the expertise for your particular needs. The expertise you need to listen to and learn from lies within the businesses with whom you share business objectives and demographics.

Hopefully, we can help you cut the bull and check out what the real big players do, so you can learn from them.

Let me know how your company approaches its email marketing in the comments below!

Categories
Business Technology

Long SaaS Ramp of Death

Posting this here to remind me to watch it again. Amazing story from the CEO of Constant Contact.

Categories
Business Process Management Business Systematization

Saas Business Process Management | BPM | Cloud Software

A company with multiple operating departments should optimize and automate a number of business processes in order to maintain its competitive edge as well as improve productivity/efficiency in its business operations.

Business Process Defined

A business process is a series of detailed measurable activities performed by individuals under an established operational system designed to attain a predetermined outcome.

The procedures have these important characteristics:

The procedures have internal and external users.

They occur across or between the organization’s departments vis-a-vis different organizations.

They may be based on how work is performed in the business.

The business processes have three key components -Entity, Things, and Tasks.

Entity refers to how the procedure is followed.
Things refer to the fact that procedures are designed in response to how actual or informational items are managed.
Tasks refer to completed work or outcomes to deal with the things or the procedural workflow.

The following are types of business processes:

a) Mortgage Process
b) Credit Verification
c) Product Development
d) Business Trip Preparations
e) New Accounts Process
f) Quotations
g) Product Shipments

Companies are working to improve their business processes using the latest computer technological applications and workflow software. In light of this development, across-the-board execution of business-process management should be established.

Automating business process management comprises of a series of steps:
The first step is enterprise resource planning. It involves the review of areas where automation has already been installed. Operating areas such as logistics, accounting, procurement and manufacturing should be looked into under the automation project. If these areas are already automated, then we go to the next step.
The second step in the automation process is in the area of marketing or customer relationship management and revenue-generation process. The third step is in the area of supplier relationship administration or the procurement process.
Business organizations are adopting BPM in these areas where it might make a difference. Majority of these procedures involve internal departments of the organization while a few of them are the results of real-time interactions between the business organization and its external partners such as its service providers, customer base and other investors.

Interest in business process management software (BPM) is expanding rapidly, as shown by a study from Forrester Study in which one third of organizations surveyed by the business are using or piloting BPM, a dramatic increase compared with mid-2002, when just 11% were attempting BPM.

Business Process Management (BPM) automates and streamlines the business processes which are vital for the organization in order to improve business efficiency. From the business process of hiring an individual to processing a purchase order, BPM aids the restructuring,controlling and handling of workflows involving employees and functional systems in order to produce a much better operating procedure for each business area.

In order for business process management (BPM) to become an effective tool, attention should be given on the outcomes of the actual business process and the designed workflows . It is capable of mapping out the interactions among the procedural workflows under which entities, things, tasks operate. Company rules utilized in the business process also should be defined. As a result of automating a business process, one could easily streamline procedures and thus control its impact on the various business processes.

Cloud BPM

You may also want to consider this — http://www.bpminstitute.org/