The SaaS industry experienced explosive growth in the last seven years, reaching a total expansion of 500%. However, that doesn’t mean success as a SaaS company is guaranteed.
In fact, customer acquisition is a challenge for many SaaS businesses, where they incur problems like:
- Integration incompatibility: Incorporating new SaaS tools into a tech stack can be problematic
- Provider dependency: Troubleshooting and feature updating issues can be difficult to solve when service providers are unresponsive
- Costly: Training with SaaS software and purchasing multiple marketing tools can be expensive
But don’t worry—client acquisition problems for SaaS companies can be resolved with an effective cold email outreach strategy. According to a study by Mckinsey, cold emails are 40x more effective than social media for client acquisition, which means you’ll get 40x as many clients with cold email.
Read on for content writing tips for SaaS companies to build the perfect cold email outreach campaign.
Cold Email Outreach Facts for Software Companies
A Hubspot survey showed that the email open rates for software companies only amount to 20%. But why is that? If cold emails are 40 times more effective than social media, why do software companies have abysmally low open rates?
Simple: SaaS email open rates are typically low because software companies don’t know how to leverage outreach properly. If businesses were to optimize their outreach strategy just by personalizing email subject lines, for instance, open rates would increase by 22%
Optimizing your cold outreach strategy is beneficial in many ways:
- Network building: Contact prospective clients unaware of your solutions to their pain points. Even if you can’t secure a sale, cold outreach helps build brand awareness
- Lead generation: Scout for potential leads and find MQLs (marketing qualified leads) through data collection, organization, and analysis
- Cost effectiveness: Receive impressive returns for low investments thanks to simple tracking and automation versus high expenses included in TV, print, and digital ads outreach methods
Cold email is an affordable and effective channel for SaaS companies, and even SaaS startups can expect improved results by incorporating cold email outreach into the SaaS company’s marketing strategy—all you need is an email account!
7 Steps to Sending Cold Emails That Get Replies
A sale typically takes five to eight follow-up emails after the initial cold contact. A brief overview of a typical cold email reply chain would look like this:
- A friendly email introducing the business and its services or products
- Several follow-up emails to continue the conversation and introduce more info, such as unique benefits compared to the competition
- An email to close the sale and thank the customer for their purchase
It’s important to emphasize that your first cold email outreach should focus on starting a conversation, so keep making a sale out of mind for now.
Before sending anything, start by identifying your ICP and the ideal customer profile’s pain points. Only then should you email to introduce yourself. Show you understand their problem, and suggest how your business can help. Then, once the initial contact is made, follow-up to continue the conversation and close your sale.
Using cold emails to initiate contact and follow the conversation to the sale, you’ll find your first customers and get a headstart on turning leads into conversions. Now let’s get into the details of writing a cold email outreach message.
Step 1: Understand Your Prospects
Your first task requires you to research your ideal customers for an intimate knowledge of their needs and interests.
Browse your prospect’s social media profile for potential pain points, or use social listening tools like Hootsuite or Hubspot to find “ins” to contact prospects.
Dig for problems that your business can resolve. For instance, if you’re offering cybersecurity software, identify things like whether your prospect has experienced a security breach, and whether they’re using a competitor’s product.
To get the most precise picture of your prospects demographics and their needs, you’ll need to answer some questions about the companies in your target industry:
- How many employees do they have?
- What software are they currently using?
- Are companies using any of my competitor’s products?
- What do growth plans look like for companies in my target industry?
Your goal is to gather as much data as possible to fully understand your prospect’s pain points. Then you can zero in on how your product can best solve their issues.
Step 2: Build an ICP
After getting an idea of your prospects, your next step involves expounding on the research to build your ICP (ideal customer profile). Building an ICP enables better personalization. For example, if you’re aiming for small businesses, you can highlight key aspects like how your software provides enhanced security for a lower price than the competition.
Cybersecurity providers, for instance, would build an ICP around customers needing heavy security for their data. An ideal ICP in the cybersecurity scenario would be clients like banks or law firms.
Sift through the target prospect data acquired in step one to identify your ICP by brainstorming on these questions:
- What type of customers do I want to sell to?
- What issues am I addressing?
- What makes us stand out against the competition?
Develop a buyer persona from your ICP by organizing profile information. Use the following demographics using data from Google Analytics and your contact database:
- Gender
- Location
- Age
- Employment status
Finally, to craft personalized messages, you’ll need more detailed psychographic data. Organize your target demographic according to their:
- Interests
- Values
- Attitudes
Psychographic data is less accessible than demographics. But you can still acquire information from Reddit, Quora, email replies, and social media monitoring.
Step 3: Create an Email List of Decision-Makers
An ICP isn’t your end-all-be-all. After all, even if you have your ICP, you won’t get anywhere if you can’t get a hold of people in the decision-making seat. For instance, reaching out to a marketing manager isn’t ideal if you’re trying to provide SaaS services.
You must identify the people that can make the final call in a sales transaction. If you’re trying to sell your cybersecurity solution, but you’re exchanging contact with a prospect in the marketing division, they won’t have the info or the authority to commit to your product. Ideally, you want to reach out to decision-makers in the prospect’s security division, or upper management.
The best way to identify decision-makers is through LinkedIn. In fact, LinkedIn hosts an active user base of 65 million decision-makers—all of which you can target.
To find decision-makers on LinkedIn, you’ll need to
- Find LinkedIn users that match your ICP
- Find their email address on their LinkedIn profile
- Send your cold outreach email
These steps are straightforward, but they can be time-extensive, and tools can automate the process to help save money and resources. We’ll discuss recommended automation tools further in this article.
Step 4: Craft Personalized Emails While Highlighting Your Unique Selling Point
Personalization can increase your likelihood of landing customers by 80%. Despite the help, however, only 30% of companies leverage personalization to their advantage, perhaps because they don’t realize its importance or how it can be achieved.
This step is where your data collection comes into play, and you’ll want to use both demographic data and psychographic data to craft your email. Include your prospect’s name and highlight key data points, such as issues they’ve encountered at work.
For example, if you’ve identified that your prospect recently experienced a security breach, you have the opportunity to show that your software gets frequently updated to counter the latest malware and ransomware definitions.
Here’s an example of how you’ll want to structure your emails:
Hello Kenny,
I’ve visited your LinkedIn profile and recently saw you talking about [pain point], and I can tell it’s been a persistent issue for you over the past few years.
I’ve also been facing similar issues and frustrations.
I’m writing to you in hopes of introducing a solution to our shared problem.
[insert product introduction]
Our team of top-tier programmers has developed unique solutions like [introduce USPs]. Furthermore, we deploy swift responses to customer feedback with a consistent and steady update schedule.
We’d love to show you how effective our product can be. So let me know your schedule so we can book a demo asap.
Hope to hear back from you soon.
Best regards,
Lonna |
Step 5: Build the Best Subject Line
Before you send that email, there’s one more thing you have to do.
A subject line is the first thing your prospects will see, so crafting a compelling one increases your open rate—It’s so important that 64% of email recipients decide to open an email from the subject line alone.
Here are some factors that make compelling subject lines:
- Urgency: Using lines like “limited time offer” introduces FOMO (fear of missing out). And through FOMO, you generate more interest in getting prospects to open your emails
- Curiosity: Weaving a sense of mystery into your subject line makes it more likely for prospects to open your email to get complete information. However, ensure the subject line aligns with your brand. Otherwise, it might trigger spam filters
- Personalization: Using first names and identifying the prospect’s unique situation in the subject line improves your email open rate
Subject lines are one of our favorite topics. Check out our 9 best subject line tips to learn more about nailing the perfect one!
Tip: In the SaaS space, use urgency to entice your prospect to make a quick purchase. Try something like: “Only for the first 100 customers, 50% off our data-protection tool!” Plus, including emojis in the subject line can help increase the open rate further.
Step 6: The Follow-Up Email
You’ll likely receive on average four rejections before your prospect finally agrees to a sale. Don’t get discouraged—it’s part of the process. When it comes to cold outreach, the secret to success is purposeful persistence, where you keep engaging with the recipient without being annoying.
Your ideal cold email outreach campaign timeline schedule should look like this:
- First contact email
- Follow-up email
- “Can you redirect me to the right person” email if the first two fail
- Follow-up email sharing customer stories or reviews as a last-ditch effort
- Break-up email (sad, but at least your recipient sees your effort)
Sometimes a conversation settles on a sales agreement early, other times the sale might happen after several more follow-up emails, or it might not happen at all. But you can increase your chances and optimize follow-up emails to draw closer to the sale by including the following:
- Reiteration of your USP
- Additional personalization items
- Modification of the CTA
While persistence is necessary to generate a lead and make a sale, it’s also vital to realize when you’re pursuing a dead lead. If the prospect refuses to reply after four to five follow-ups, it’s time to give up the ghost. Don’t waste your time chasing down closed and locked doors.
Step 7: Include Automation Tools
Incorporating software into your cold email outreach campaign can optimize the process and help make your job easier. Here are some tools to consider adding to your tech stack:
- Saleshandy Connect: Software that captures email addresses from LinkedIn, providing additional tools like a deliverability monitor and email scheduler
- Jasper.ai: AI-assisted writing software that can generate good email content
- ChatGPT: Automation software that can create unique content based on inputted prompts
- Dotdigital: All-in-one tool that can create email templates, collect data, and dashboard provider
- Active Campaign: Email CRM tool powered by automation capabilities
Including AI tools in your stack enables more effortless scalability, allowing you to launch and sustain a cold email outreach without breaking your back or depleting your resources. Isn’t that what we all need?
Alleviate SaaS Customer Acquisition Through Cold Email Outreach
Convincing people to buy into SaaS takes work. After all, getting people on the same page and working efficiently takes a lot of training.
But through some content writing tips, you can work your way out of a hairy situation, where employing a good content writer can craft a good cold email outreach strategy for your SaaS business to grow to unprecedented heights.
If you’re ready to update your content writing strategy and work towards developing a cold email outreach campaign, contact the experts at ScaleUp Sales. We’ll be the ground control that directs your cold outreach campaigns on the runway of success.
Generate customers through cold email outreach. Contact us today!
