Why does your SaaS company need outbound email marketing?

SaaS products are service based, so a SaaS company depends on their customers and users. If you are a startup, it is possible for people to not know that you have a SaaS product in the first place. To let your product be known to potential customers, outbound email marketing is helpful. 

In outbound email marketing, you find out segments of potential customers that most likely require your SaaS product. You divide them into relevant groups and acquire their contacts through directories, and send them outbound emails introducing your SaaS product as per the potential customers’ need. 

Let’s call these potential customers leads, as they are not fully your customers yet. Through outbound emails, you’re not merely giving a sales pitch, you’re presenting the value proposition of your product to the people who need it, which helps both parties. 

Why is outbound email marketing for SaaS different from general outbound email marketing?  

While general outbound email marketing is more like a one time sales pitch to leads than a long term value proposition, SaaS outbound email marketing is not just a sales pitch, but a proposal for long term service. In the case of SaaS, outbound emails are not only specifically targeted but also segmented. Deep segmentation does not necessarily take place in general outbound emails marketing. 

SaaS companies, through outbound email marketing, do not sell their product, they introduce their products and offer the subscription to the product’s service. For SaaS, outbound email marketing turns into a relationship where the customers’ needs are understood and it is assumed that the customer or the lead is also educated about the product. It revolves around a cycle of service and subscription that is eventually nurtured.  

Core Steps of Outbound SaaS Email Marketing 

Outbound email marketing is done through a set of steps. Each step of the process is important for outbound email marketing to work properly. Here is the elaborate understanding of the steps of outbound SaaS email marketing. 

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Buyer Persona Development

The first step of outbound email marketing is to decide a group of customers who will receive the emails. This is called ideal customer profile making based on the customers’ niche of work and industry relevance. With ICP analysis, you can develop a buyer persona considering revenue of the customer company, their size, their locations etc. ICP analysis and buyer persona ensure that you’re reaching out to the right group of people. 

Lead Sourcing and Lead List Building 

Lead sourcing refers to the act of finding the list of potential customers you’ll be contacting. You can find the source of leads from industry relevant online directories, where there are lists of people, their companies, and their contact addresses for you to build a lead list. 

Segmenting the Lead List 

Now that you have the list of actual people or customers, you apply the ICP and persona on the list and segment the people in groups for real. You divide them in groups based on the customer company’s revenue which decides who is more likely to be interested in purchasing after being contacted. 

Their company size also matters to determine the interest and affordability for purchasing. Also, location is another important factor to determine the potential segment. Your potential customers’ location must be the same as where you’re planning to target.

Segmenting the Services 

After your segments of people are ready, now it’s time to segment your services according to the segments of customers. It aligns whatever you offer as a SaaS with what your customer segment has. 

For example, whether or not a company integrates with a certain technology is one of the factors for segmenting. You can segment your service of a certain technology aligning with that segment of people who integrates that technology,   

Email Copywriting for Each Segment. 

Now it comes to the body of the work where you’ll create the email. Copywriting for the email is the heart of email marketing. You have to customize each email depending on the segments, who you’re sending and why you’re sending, which means each segment’s email is different from the other.  

Personalization and Spintaxing 

You can add customized details to personalize the emails with your customers. You can address them by their name, discuss a unique feature of their company, to make it feel more connected and familiar between you and your customer. Spintaxing refers to exacting different specific details and addressing for each different email to maintain the personalization. 

Setting up Emails and Warming up Emails

Now coming to the technicalities. In order to send outbound emails, you need to set up a domain to become trustworthy to google. These domain setups are not always the company’s main domain address. For cold email outreach, you create a separate domain as a registration for sending cold emails.

You can use tools for warming up emails. Warming up is the process to make sent emails trustworthy enough to not land in the spam folder. In this case, the tool creates an infrastructure where human interaction is mimicked to open and reply to your sent emails, so that google believes the emails you're sending are genuine and not spam, and are good enough to reach the audience.   

Cold email campaign

Finally, after you’re done segmenting and setting up, and your emails are ready with copywriting, segmentation and spitaxing, you launch the email campaign, which usually starts with an intro email followed by followups and further communication for conversion. 

Tracking Analytics and Reporting 

After your email campaign is launched, it’s time to track the analytics and reports of their performance. Email open rates, CTA click rates, reply rates, and even bounce rates, these analytics tell how well the cold emails are performing for conversion. 

Onwards, Nurturing Responding Leads

In the case of cold emails, the conversion rates are usually low, but a certain percentage of leads do convert. After the launching and analysing the campaign, the next task is to nurture those leads that respond to convert. 

Research Methodology

For researching this blog, I’ve selected 7 SaaS outbound email marketing agencies ranking them in no particular order, evaluating them based on the steps of outbound email marketing. The agencies are analyzed considering how many steps of SaaS outbound email marketing they follow. The steps are: 

1. Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Buyer Persona Development

2. Lead Sourcing and Lead List Building 

3. Segmenting the Lead List 

4. Segmenting the Services 

5. Email Copywriting for Each Segment. 

6. Personalization and Spintaxing 

7. Setting up Emails and Warming up Emails

8. Cold email campaign

9. Tracking Analytics and Reporting 

10. Onwards, Nurturing Responding Leads

The analysis of the selected SaaS outbound email marketing agencies include how many steps they follow from this checklist of steps.

According to experts, only 3% of the outbound emails get a reply, so 97% efforts do not always work out. The 3% success rate is not just by chance. This depends on a lot of strategies, targeting, segmentation and personalization. If you get the discussed fundamentals right, the correct agency can help you overcome the 97% failure rate.  

Best Outbound Email Marketing Agencies for SaaS

Here is the list and analysis of 7 best SaaS outbound email marketing agencies. 

Cleverviral

Cleverviral was founded in 2021, in Bangalore, India, with a concise 2-9 employees. However, their services for outbound email marketing for SaaS make them included in the list of the best. According to their website, they specialize in personalized B2B cold outreach. 

What they do the best: 

• Deep business and industry research for ICP

• Setting up emails with optimal configuration boosting delivery speed.

• Warming up emails

• Crafting compelling copies for emails

• Spintaxing and launching cold email campaign

• Tracking reports and analytics

• Eventually nurturing leads. 

Cleverviral is one such outbound email marketing agency that follows almost all the steps of the process closely.   

SeeResponse

Established in 2018 in Virginia with 11-50 employee range, SeeResponse is a B2B marketing company with the service of SaaS email marketing and outbound service. They follow almost all the steps of outbound email marketing, starting with ICP research which they cover by prospecting.

They conduct customer segmentation based on various factors. Prospecting also includes lead listing as well. After that, they conduct outreach or launch a cold email campaign introducing the clients’ SaaS products to targeted customers. 

SeeResponse also follows the steps of warming up emails, copywriting for emails, and personalizing. Along with tracking the performance of launched cold email campaigns, they conduct A/B testing and optimization as well based on the response and results.   

Nerdy Joe

Founded in 2019 in Florida, with an 11-50 range of employees and much less followers on Linkedin, Nerdy Joe shines in their confidence that exudes through their website. They strongly claim to follow most of the steps of outbound email marketing, starting with preparing targeted lists to send emails, which cumulatively means ICP development and lead listing, along with customer segmentation. 

Nerdy Joe also vouches for setting and warming up emails by architecting the sending infrastructure. They make sure that emails land in the inbox, not the spam folder. For writing emails, they go beyond just making templates. They message copies can be personalized, segmented and persuasive that matches the value proposition, so that replies come from genuine interest. 

Even if they are not following all the steps of outbound email marketing closely, some of their steps are merged together that cover almost all the steps of the process anyway. 

Cleverly

Cleverly was founded in 2017, in California, with an 11-50 range of employees. In their website they have 100+ case studies on cold email marketing, proving themselves in the market. The steps of outbound email marketing are clearly mentioned and explained on Cleverly’s website. 

What steps they follow:

• Defining target audience and creating personals

• Lead list building

• Email copywriting

• Personalization and customer segmentation

• Micro campaign of A/B testing experimentation 

• Launching a drip campaign of outbound emails  

Though they skip the step of services segmentation, overall, Cleverly does fit into the criteria of steps of outbound email marketing for SaaS. 

SalesHive

Founded in 2016 in Colorado, SalesHive has the employee range of 200-500, specializing in B2B lead generation, cold calling and email marketing. As their website information suggests, they skip the steps of ICP development, lead sourcing and customer segmentation. 

What they do the best:

• Domain warming

• Volume throttling, which means controlling the volume of emails sent in a span of time

• Email campaign launching 

• Smart personalization, which includes personalized copywriting for emails

• Conducting tracking and monitoring analytics and reports, which includes categorization of lead responses

So, SalesHive works as a detail manager for clients in the field of SaaS outbound email marketing. 

Belkins

Established in Delaware in 2017, Belkins has a high number of employees, ranging from 200 to 500. However, despite being high in numbers, their website shows that they skip some of the steps of outbound email marketing. Instead of conducting the ICP research themselves, they analyze the outreach history of their clients. 

As Belkins is not involved in ICP research and lead sourcing, they also do not segment the leads and the services of the Saas product, predominantly relying on clients’ sources, 

Nonetheless, Belkins follows the latter steps of the outbound email marketing process pretty well. They set up the domain name system, create mailboxes and prepare for mass email campaigns by small batches. 

Most significantly, Belkins do personalized and spintaxed copywriting for emails including tracking replies and nurturing responding leads. Belkins has a dedicated team to track reports of performances, along with A/B testing of which approach works the best. Apart from the steps of receiver segmentation, Belkins follow the significant steps of SaaS outbound email marketing.   

Cience

With 20k followers and employee number ranging from 200 to 500, Cience was founded in 2023 in Colorado. Within the short span of 2 years, they’ve gained good numbers for themselves. For the steps of SaaS outbound email marketing, Cience starts with prospect identification and ICP analysis, including prospect sourcing and prospect listing. 

What steps they follow:

• Prospect identification and ICP analysis

• Prospect sourcing and prospect listing

• Multi-threading, where they find multiple stakeholders in a company as prospects, and include them in the email list

• Providing tailored and personalized copywriting for emails that converts prospects

• Email warming up and domain management 

• Conducting initial outreach and engagement

• Providing monitoring, optimization and insights

Afterwards, Cience nurtures responding leads and prospects with their human and AI combined SDR. 

Comparison Table 

TL;DR

Let’s look at the comparison between the agencies and what service they provide at a glance. 

Conclusion

SaaS outbound email marketing is not simply giving out emails to random strangers. It is a strategic process that includes deep personalization and segmentation. From finding the right people to send emails to nurturing leads’ responses, each step is important in the process of SaaS outbound email marketing.

As you’ve seen, this blog picked and discussed such agencies that cover most of these steps of outbound email marketing, if not all. Some of these agencies do not follow all the steps of the process but merge their steps to cover the overall process, and some follow each step closely. 

Outbound email marketing is one of the many ways to grow your SaaS company. SEO is just as important if you want to bring in the correct leads through search. Check out Rank Wizards’ SEO services that will help your SaaS company attract the right traffic that can turn into retained customers.