Don’t play with your SaaS onboarding emails, because they’re the key to long-term customer retention and higher user activation.
Just like you judge books by their covers, your users judge how useful your SaaS product is from their first few emails—actually, 63% of users use onboarding emails to decide whether a product is worth it.
Your onboarding emails are your users’ first impression of your entire product experience.
They should:
- Set the tone for what users should expect
- Guide the user to the AHA so they understand how your product fits in their lives
- Give them clear next steps on how to use your product to achieve their goals
Unfortunately, too many SaaS still don’t know how to optimize their emails for higher user activation and long-term customer retention.
Or they over-complicate it with extra steps, big tasks, and unclear next steps, which makes 74% of customers switch to easier options.
Not you, not today.
A strategic onboarding email sequence can boost user activation by up to 30%, and significantly reduce churn within the crucial 21-day sign-up period.
Whether you’re a startup looking to follow best practices so that you engage new users, or a scaleup looking to refine your emails and user experience…
In this post, we’ll cover how to research, plan, and write onboarding emails that activate, nurture, and convert your new users by the end of their journey.
Let's start with why SaaS onboarding journeys don't convert
Your onboarding has two jobs: user activation and customer retention.
There are many reasons why onboarding emails barely get opened and convert once in a blue moon:
- Targeting the wrong user segments, so your copy doesn’t resonate with them
- Vague, confusing copy that kills your users’ attention and makes them forget about your product
- A frustrating experience: Links don’t work, resources don’t arrive on time, too many emails that feel like spam, or too few emails to educate them about your product.
These reasons have huge, long-term consequences to your customer retention, user activation, and revenue:
- Embarrassing engagement rates: Your onboarding emails maintain an abysmal 15-20% open rate, hinting that users don’t like or don’t care about your emails. And if you’re stuck in the Promotions tab? It’s nearly over.
- Dead activations: New users keep signing up, but after getting their login details they abandon your product. A few reasons for this include vague, unclear calls-to-action, making your emails about your product instead of how it solves their problems, or an overwhelming info-dump that leaves them confused. With a 20-35% industry activation rate, you can aim higher and keep more of your users hooked and engaged with your product.
- The sign-up & drop: About 20% of users who sign up for a free trial do not become customers. If you get 650 trials monthly, that’s 520 potential customers lost every month. And if your onboarding emails don’t help them get past your product’s learning curve, you could be losing even more customers.
Your onboarding emails are the key to preventing mass abandonment and retaining users who don’t just want your product but can spend money to get it.
Onboarding Emails Should Connect and Convert
I say this on my home page: you can’t activate, nurture, or convert more users without connecting with them first.
SaaS emails usually fall into the boring/basic/soulless messaging trap —a result of not understanding what your customers need to hear.
The emails are more about urgent discounts and long lists of features than empathizing with the user and showing them how to achieve their goals with the product – that’s where the ‘AHA’ moment comes in.
According to GrowthMentor, the AHA moment is the moment that your user understands the value and benefit of your Saas and decides to use it.
You can fast-track your users to the AHA with these tips:
- Hyper-Personalization: Personalization isn’t just about using their name, although “Dear User” feels spammy and robotic. To make your users feel seen and understood, use data about their individual needs, roles, and behaviors so that your emails are specific to them.
- Strong Value Proposition: Every email should answer the question, “Why should I care?”. Make your user the main character in your emails by slashing unnecessary I’s and we’s.
- Clear next steps: Too many calls-to-action will overwhelm your user, while a single but a vague one will confuse them. Plan your onboarding emails with actionable, achiveable actions your users can complete in minutes. We’ll cover this in depth in the planning section.
- Perfect Timing: If your user expects your product to be fast and efficient, it’s the same for your emails. Wait too long and you’ll give you user more time to find a more responsive option. If you’re sending emails too early, then they won’t be able experience the AHA at the right time. If you have multiple segements, customize the timing to fit the users’ journeys.
How to research for SaaS onboarding emails
After you’ve mapped out your onboarding lifecycle, it’s time to research for the messages that’ll convert for your users.
If you’re thinking, “Mira, where do I get all the data about their pain points, needs, behaviors, and roles?”
That’s where I come in because I’m all about data-driven emails.
Let’s start with what you should be looking for:
- Pain points: What’s the pressing problem they need to solve? What other pains surround that problem and keep them from their goals?
- Stage of awareness: The length & depth of your emails depend on how familiar they are with your product
- Voice of customer (VOC): This is what your customers sat about themselves, your product, and your industry
- Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD): This includes the functional, emotional, and social jobs your product does for your users.
- Motivations: What’s keeping them going? What goals are they moving towards?
Here’s some examples of each for Emilia Emails, an email marketer targeted by an email sending platform:
Pain points:
- Struggling with low email open and click-through rates.
- Difficulty segmenting email lists effectively.
- Time-consuming process of designing and A/B testing email campaigns.
- Challenges in tracking and analyzing email performance metrics.
- Managing compliance with email marketing regulations (e.g., GDPR, CAN-SPAM).
- Need for better personalization and automation capabilities.
Stage of awareness:
- Problem Aware: Emilia knows that her email campaigns are not performing as well as she would like, but she might not be fully aware of all the solutions available.
- Solution Aware: Emilia is aware that there are tools and platforms that can help improve her email marketing efforts but needs more information on which one would best suit her needs.
Voice of customer (VOC):
- “I spend hours crafting the perfect email, but my open rates are still disappointing.”
- “I need a better way to segment my email lists to send more targeted campaigns.”
- “Tracking the performance of my emails is a nightmare; I need simpler, more intuitive analytics.”
- “It’s hard to keep up with all the regulations; I’m worried about compliance issues.”
- “I wish I could personalize my emails more without spending so much time on each one.”
Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD):
- Create and send effective email campaigns that achieve high engagement rates.
- Easily segment and manage email lists for targeted marketing.
- Save time in designing, testing, and optimizing email content.
- Monitor and analyze email campaign performance with user-friendly tools.
- Ensure compliance with relevant email marketing laws and regulations.
- Implement personalized and automated email marketing strategies to improve customer experience and retention.
Motivations:
- To increase the return on investment (ROI) from email marketing efforts.
- To build stronger relationships with subscribers and customers through better email communication.
- To stay ahead of competitors by using advanced email marketing techniques.
- To streamline the email marketing process, making it more efficient and less time-consuming.
- To enhance the overall effectiveness of marketing campaigns and achieve business goals.
This isn’t an exhaustive list of customer data sources, but these are some of what I use for my clients and myself:
- Online reviews: G2, Amazon, Crunchbase, etc.
- Internal surveys: New customer surveys, existing customer surveys, thank-you page survey, and in-app surveys
- External surveys: Non-customer surveys such as UserTesting or AYTM
- Interviews: New customer interviews, founder/staff interviews, and past customer interviews.
- Analytics: Open rates, click-through rates, and bounce rates
- Social media posts from your users
- Blog/article review mining
You can use this data to determine:
- Whether your open rates stay consistent or drop towards the end of the sequence
- If users open your emails but don’t convert
- How long it takes your users to convert
- If your users barely open your emails
- How much feedback you get from your users
Your results will help you plan the number and timing of emails you’ll use, which we’re covering next.
Planning your SaaS onboarding email journey
Once you’ve collected your customer data, it’s time to plan the length of your onboarding journey and the contents of each email.
If your first thought is to open Funnellytics and draw a funnel, please ignore it.
First, determine what style of timing you’ll use. The two types of timing are dripped emails and the traditional time-based emails.
Triggered emails go out every time a user performs an action such as clicking a link or opening an email. Their advantage? They adapt to your user’s behaviour and add personalization, leading to more conversions and engagement.
Dripped emails are released over a period of time regardless of whether the user takes action. They’re simple and consistent, but aren’t as relevant as dripped emails.
That’s why your email journey shouldn’t be too long, or too short that they don’t have enough time to experience the AHA.
Up next, deciding on your email journey’s length.
Your onboarding journey can be anywhere from 4 to 35 emails, but the average length is nine emails.
This depends on your user’s persona, your average sales cycle stage, your user’s journey stage, and even their stage of awareness upon signing up (problem aware = educate more; solution aware = differentiate more).
As of April 2024, Encharge had a 13-email onboarding journey.
I wrote seven emails for TC Global in 2022.
Steph from Get Your SaaS On Board found that:
- Zoom had 8 emails
- Mint had 5 emails
- Freshbooks had 14 emails
Now for the *bonus* part – getting clear on your milestones to guide users to the AHA.
How To Use Milestones To Plan Your Onboarding Emails Will Say
Your milestones aren’t just boxes for your user to tick. They help you map out the necessary steps to get to the AHA.
They’re specific like, “Get your first payment by sending your invoice”, and low-effort like “follow three users on X”.
Your milestones are also different from your email’s goals. The goal of the email is what the email should do, e.g. ‘welcome the user’, while the milestone is what the user should complete to reach the AHA and engage with the app.
Now that we’ve covered everything, it’s time to get practical.
Follow my process for planning onboarding emails for my clients (with a screenshot of my milestone template):
- Decide how many emails you’re writing
- Choose between time-based or dripped timing
- Determine when each email will go
- For dripped emails, it could be when a user opens an email or clicks a link
- For timed-based emails, it could be over a few days, e.g. Email 1 – Day 1, and Email 2 – Day 34. Determine the users’ AHA moment
- Fill in the emails from start to finish with 1-2 milestones each. Each milestone guides the user towards the AHA, and prompts them to use the app more often.
- Crosscheck the milestones – if they’re more than two and can’t be done within 1-5 minutes, remove them.
Now you’re ready to write your emails!
5 Steps For Writing Your SaaS Onboarding Emails
I’ll tell you an open industry secret:
Your research is 70-80% of your copy.
Once you’ve collected & organized your research, it’s time to pick a copywriting formula and write away!
Let’s get into how to write your emails based on the research you got and the onboarding journey you planned.
There are five make-or-break element of every SaaS onboarding email:
- Subject line
- Preview text
- Hook
- Body copy
- CTA
It’s the same framework I use in Optimize in 10, my free onboarding email audit (details here).
Let’s break down each section and how to use ‘em for persuasive emails your readers want to read.
Subject line:
The first element of your email and the most important one. Vague, unclear, or too-specific subject lines won’t persuade your users to open them.
Before you pick a subject line:
- Is it attention-grabbing?
- Is it relevant to your user?
- Have you spilled the beans already?
Preview text:
This gives your users a glimpse of what’s in the email and what to expect.
For example, preview text an upgrade email with a 20% discount code for the user’s first month could be: “Save $_ in your first month”, or “20% discount inside”. It’s not necessary, but it can increase your chance for opens.
While drafting your preview text:
- Does it relate to the subject line?
- Is there an incentive to open?
Hook:
After your user has opened your email, you need to retain their attention and keep them reading.
A hook can be a one-liner targeting your users’ pain points like this:
Or it could use storytelling to make them aware of the problem they have:
When writing your hook:
- Is it relevant to the reader?
- Is it attention-grabbing?
- Does your hook get straight to the point, or is it full of filler content?
Body copy:
Your body copy includes paragraphs, bullet points, headings, and CTAs or CTVs (calls to value). Your body copy continues the open loop up from your hook.
Don’t limit yourself to short, snappy sentences! Get specific about what your product does for them, and how its features get them closer to achieving their goals so that your users see themselves using it.
If you’re using bullet points, be specific and don’t be afraid to make them long. use them to show your users the value of your product.
For example, instead of just saying: “Automatically save your projects,” try “Never lose your drafts again with the autosave”
As you’re reviewing your body copy:
- Is the copy clear?
- What’s in it for them?
- Is there personalization?
CTA (or CTV):
The last but not the least important element.
A CTA (call to action) prompts the user to take action, e.g.”Get started” or “Choose a plan.”
A CTV (call to value) highlights what the user gets after they click e.g. “Save 5+ hours manually pitching leads,” or “Build your first landing page in minutes.”
To avoid overwhelm, you onboarding email should have a maximum of two CTAs. If you have more than one CTA, the primary CTA should redirect your users to the app while your secondary CTA leads them to a related resource, example, or social proof.
See how I managed two CTAs in a client’s email using the P.S. strategy:
When writing your CTAs:
- Is you user’s next step clear?
- Are you using calls-to-value to build their desire?
- Have you reflected what they want?
Before you go, here’s some tips to help you improve them further.
15 Tips For Improving, Testing & Tracking Your SaaS Onboarding Emails
After writing and editing your emails, how do you optimize, test, and track the right metrics?
No worries, I’ve shared a few tips —*ahem* eighteen strategies in six groups— you can use to optimize your emails better and track their performance.
Save these for the next time you’re working on your emails:
a. For building trust and emotional connection:
- Use power words that evoke emotion and urgency, e.g. ‘interesting’, ‘effective‘, ‘hero‘, and ‘loser‘.
- Build your credibility with social proof such as customer success stories, ratings, awards, certifications, and reviews.
- People love stories! Use storytelling to engage your users, get them emotionally connected to your product and brand, and help them visualize using your product.
b. Segmenting for success and specific needs:
- Segment your users based on in-app actions such as clicking to a landing page, downloading a resource, filling a for, etc.
- Align your email messaging with your in-app messaging for .
- Create psychographic segments based on user goals and pain points.
C. Mobile-friendly emails for users hooked on their phones/tablets:
- Use responsive design with a single-column layout.
- Make your buttons hard to ignore with large sizes (minimum 44×44 pixels) and contrasting colors from the email.
- Optimize and compress images for quick loading on mobile networks — I use tinypng.
d. Find your winning email versions with A/B testing:
- Keep an open mind and learn from your tests whether they fail or succeed.
- Aim for elements where conversions happen. Test subject lines, pricing, product descriptions, and CTAs.
- Use multivariate testing (testing multiple elements simultaneously) to find winning combinations, such as ‘subject line + image + CTA’.
e. Set your emails up for success by tracking the metrics that count:
- Target 20%+ click-through rates for highly-engaged segments.
- The more eyes on your emails, the more users you can convert. Target 40% or higher open rates.
- What’s a good conversion rate benchmark? 5-10% from email to in-app action.
Every onboarding email you send is an inbox-salesperson that builds trust, shows your products’ value, and guides users to their AHA moment.
As more SaaS companies break into the market, you can stay on top of the competition by hooking your users with your onboarding emails.
Using my strategies and tips as a starting point, you can transform your onboarding journey from an under-performing welcome sequence to a powerful user retention funnel.
P.S: You can skip the trial-and-error and desk-slamming with an email audit or by working with me on new emails.
Think your onboarding emails aren’t performing as well as they should?
You can’t afford to sacrifice a few hours to work on your emails’ CTAs, rewrite the body copy, optimize the subject lines, sort through 82 AI-generated subject lines— should I continue?
But if there was a risk-free, $0-required way to get conversion-based insights that showed you EXACTLY what to optimize in your emails…
You’re listening. And I’m answering.
Take ‘Update onboarding emails’ or ‘Work on CTAs for trial emails’ off your pending tasks with ‘Optimize in 10’, the free SaaS onboarding/trial email audit.
Share your first three emails in a Google Doc and get a 10-minute audit back in 48 hours.
