Category: SaaS

5 SaaS Content Marketing Examples to Use in 2025

Posted on by Daniel Lofaso

SaaS content marketing is one of my favorite types of SEO-driven content to ideate and produce. It is not for the faint of heart, which means it is often the most creative, engaging, and original content that wins the rankings race. In this space, content generalists and quick-and-dirty AI-driven crap doesn’t stand a chance.

This is the vertical where the best SEOs and content marketing thrive, and where you can too if you follow the strategies of these top SaaS companies. Dive right into the examples, and learn more about how we determine the content to go after versus that content to avoid later in this post.

Table of Contents

SaaS Content Marketing Examples

Here are some great examples of content marketing from some of our favorite technology companies. Note that some highlight entire content strategies while other examples hone in on one particular content type.

Ahrefs– create content with business impact in mind

Ahrefs, an SEO software that I use daily, is one of the best content marketing examples of a tech company. Using no outside funding whatsoever, they managed to grow to over $40m in ARR, in part because of their badass content marketing.

Note this:

  • Ahrefs does no paid spending on Google Ads
  • They don’t attend conferences
  • All their blogs feature their products

Yet, they make about $800k in revenue per employee. Facebook has similar metrics.

If you take a look at Ahref’s blog, you’ll notice that each post does the following:

  1. Provides an SEO problem and solution
  2. Is founded on keyword research
  3. Features their software as part of the solution

Ahrefs is pretty open as to what their secret sauce is for creating blog topics, and outlines it all here in this post about Keyword Analysis for SEO. Below is a screenshot from what I believe to be the biggest takeaway in terms of topic selection as it relates to business impact.

ProfitWell (now SBI)- create sales-driven content

The ProfitWell blog is a wealth of information for SaaS companies that want to improve subscription businesses, but it is their Pricing Page Teardowns that I really love.

profitwell content marketing example

This is an example of some outside-of-the-box content marketing as it uses well-known brands and tears down their pricing strategy to see what they could do better. The site itself does a great job of bringing in traffic (Ahrefs says it ranks for over 55,500 keywords), so this unique content angle provides a lot of value and is likely to get the attention of the companies they feature, potentially converting them into customers.

The above approach could be used in conjunction with an account-based marketing strategy. Imagine being the recipient of a pricing page teardown from your business. That’s sales-driven content production at its finest.

dacast – create best of posts that mention your competitors objectively

OTT software company dacast is a content juggernaut in the somewhat new OTT space. According to Ahrefs, their site ranks for over 106,000 keywords and ranks well for high volume searches such as “streaming platforms” and “streaming software.”

dacast content marketing example

What is interesting about the dacast content marketing strategy is that they are not afraid to mention their competitors directly in their content. For example, on their blog on live streaming platforms, they use a mix of content marketing best practices — keyword research-infused sections — as well as a 25- company roundup post that showcases all of their pros and cons.

While many companies would be reluctant to introduce competitors within their blog posts, presumably, dacast does this to provide a side-by-side comparison that ensures they look like the best option.

HotJar– create pillar and cluster content

HotJar, a top name in heat mapping software and recording, shows a great example of pillar and cluster (or hub and spoke) content with their heatmaps content.

dacast content marketing example

The pillar and cluster format that HotJar used is really effective when it comes to trying to rank for a difficult keyword with a lot of related sub-topics (clusters). The page ranks #1 for “heatmaps,” and the supplemental content accessible on the sidebar provides a great user experience for visitors who want to learn more about heatmaps.

It hits the mark for keyword research as well, but the navigation on the sidebar (which is visible on all of the links on the sidebar) is the real winner for internal linking.

Atlassian– utilize every content asset for your most valuable content

47,000 searches per month for “Kanban.” Keyword difficulty 86/100. An equivalent PPC value of $94.4K… per month. Yeah, you could say Atlassian’s SaaS content marketing is pretty good.

They take the hub and spoke method mentioned above and take it to the next level.

Their Kanban page, for example, some of the best SaaS content you can find to help fuel your strategy:

  • Definition resource
  • Video
  • Hub and spoke sidebar menu
  • In-body featured content section
  • Screenshots
  • Infographics
  • Grids
  • Free resources

It’s a masterclass on internal linking and being the defacto best resource on the web for this type of content.

SaaS Content Marketing Strategy is All About the Competition

At Digital Elevator, we spend a lot of time doing SEO competitive analyses for our clients. An SEO competitive analysis reveals, in part, the types of content marketing strategies that your competitors are leveraging to be successful, what their weaknesses are, and how you can create a roadmap of your own to crush them.

There are a lot of factors we look into when doing a competitive analysis, but as it concerns content marketing, this is what you need to know:

  • Who your competitors are from an SEO and content marketing perspective
  • How to identify keyword gaps
  • How to find competitors’ top pages (and beat them at their own game)
  • Knowing which topics not to go after

Who your competitors are from an SEO and content marketing perspective

The best way to understand what I mean when I say “understand competitors from an SEO and content marketing perspective” is best served up with an example. The short of it is that competitors can compete with you on a keyword level but not necessarily on a product or service level.

For the site, Monday.com, a quick software search reveals that there are several other sites that are the primary organic competitors (SEMRush: Competitive domains are displayed depending on competition level, which is based on the number of keywords of each domain, and the number of the domains’ common keywords).

With this information, I can now go into each of these competitors’ sites, reverse engineer their best-performing content, and strategize ways for my client to outperform them. This strategy is and should always be fundamental in any sound content marketing strategy.

However, the competitive analysis should not end there. We also need to understand the most important keywords to our client and perform a competitive analysis on the search engine rankings page (SERPs) to determine if these competitors are different from what was revealed on a domain-level basis. 

For example, the Monday.com site has a top blog targeting  “project management software” that reveals different competitors from what the initial software analysis revealed (shown by Ahrefs):

Here, I can see that there are some other sites that don’t compete with Monday.com on a product or service level (as in the Main Organic Competitors result above), but on a keyword level. For example, PCMag is not a project management software.

Now, this is a simplified example of a content marketing competitive analysis, but reveals some key takeaways:

Takeaways

  • It is essential to know who offers similar products or services — and how and why they rank.
  • It is also important to know competitors who may fall outside what you may define as a direct competitor as they may be potentially taking market share due to their rankings above you.

How to identify keyword gaps

A Content Gap analysis is important to a content marketing strategy because it reveals keywords your competitors rank for, but you don’t. 

Content Gaps can be performed on a domain-level or on a URL level, meaning you can evaluate competitors’ content as a whole or segment one of their blogs against yours (on the same topic).

For example, this Content Gap on a domain level (using Ahrefs) reveals 17,983 keywords that monday.com doesn’t rank for. With this insight, I can choose to reverse engineer the content pieces and add them to the content calendar, strategically formulating a plan to go after their best-performing content.

How to find competitors’ top pages (and beat them at their own game)

SEO software also allows us to reverse engineer our competitors’ best content, the estimated traffic, and other important metrics that help determine if we want to beef up our content on similar topics or create rival content.

In this example, I can see one of Monday.com’s biggest competitors’ best-performing content, see the keywords they rank for, how much traffic they get, and then determine if that same content makes sense for our client’s site.

Knowing which topics not to go after (keyword difficulty)

You may be thinking, “Great, I’ll just go after the 20 best pages on my competitor’s sites, and I’ll dominate market share.” While this sounds good in theory, the reality is not all keywords are as easy to rank for as others.

Let’s take a look at Monday.com’s competitor The Digital Project Manager, and their 7th most popular resource, Best GRC Tools (Government, Risk, Compliance), as an example:

Aside from the contextual irrelevancy this particular topic has to Monday.com, lies the challenge of actually competing for this resource and the primary keyword “GRC software.” Let’s assume for this exercise that we were interested in competing.

The metric called “KD,” or Keyword Difficulty, is a scale of 0-100 that establishes how difficult it would be to rank for this keyword (with 100 being the most difficult). The KD of this keyword is 31, meaning it is really competitive. In fact, Ahrefs estimates that you’d need 38 links to rank for this keyword.

Without getting into the ins and outs of link building and algorithm factors, the primary takeaway here is the following:

Takeaways

  • Knowing what content you can compete for easily is important to your overall content marketing strategy.
  • Knowing that content is really difficult to rank for, and why, will help you determine if you want to dedicate the resources to going after that type of content and keywords. 

SaaS Content Marketing Best Practices

Ok, let’s say you now have buy-in and want to get started on content marketing. You should know some content marketing best practices to ensure you are moving things in the right direction.

Have Realistic Time Expectations

If you think content marketing will be a quick win, you may want to consider other marketing strategies. To provide some context, Ahrefs did a study to determine how long it takes to rank a page. Needless to say, their results were startling:

ahrefs age of pages ranking in google

Only 22% of pages that rank in the top 10 of the search results were less than a year old. 

Content marketing takes time. If you are going to commit to this strategy, make sure your team understands it is a long-term play, not a quick win. That said, you should set up some metrics to measure your success.

Establish OKRs 

OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results, is a goal-setting strategy for defining and tracking your efforts and their outcomes. For your content marketing efforts, some examples of OKRs could be the following:

Objective: 

  • Improve inbound lead generation by 10% in one year.

Key Results: 

  • Allocate 10% of marketing spend to content marketing efforts
  • Increase organic website traffic by 50%

Content Production is Only Half of the Strategy

We know that the following needs to happen to create effective content marketing strategies:

  1. We understand who our readers are and why they want our products or services
  2. We understand that competitors are the biggest hindrance between us ranking and driving traffic and leads
  3. We understand that we have to be strategic about what we write so that it works to accomplish our business goals of brand awareness, lead generation, and ultimately, sales

With all this knowledge (which, by the way, takes a lot of effort to extrapolate), you may think you have all your bases covered. If you write it they will come, right?

Unfortunately, there is a whole other element to content marketing outside the content itself, and that is promotion. The main drivers of helping get eyeballs on your content are the following:

  • Email marketing: One of the most effective ways to get instant eyeballs on your content is to share it with your existing email network. 
  • Social media: Like email marketing, social media is a way to push out content to your existing network. However, many social media sites make organic content discovery very difficult, meaning you’ll likely have to pay to promote your content if you want to get a meaningful amount of eyeballs on it. In fact, a recent study revealed that the median engagement rate of Facebook posts across all industries was less than 1%.
facebook engagement stats
  • Link building: Most SEOS agree that links are one of the most highly correlated aspects of ranking. I personally agree, and lean on studies that strongly support the claim that Google leans heavily on link building as a ranking factor. Bottom line: you need a link building strategy in place alongside your content marketing strategy.

Understand Resource Allocation vs Outsourcing Models

There are several ways to approach content marketing, including an in-house team, an outsourced team, or a combination of the two.

An in-house team is likely to be the most familiar with a company, its products or services, the ideal customer, and the company’s voice. On the flip side, they tend to be the least savvy in data-driven content marketing.

Outsourced teams provide an extremely high level of expertise, having the software, tools, and human resources at their disposal to roll out tried and tested content marketing strategies. On the downside, they lack that total familiarity with a company because they are on the outside.

A hybrid strategy combining in-house marketing teams and outsourced vendors may provide the best solution for content marketing. You get the complete buy-in from internal employees who work wholeheartedly with outsourced partners to ensure company goals are met.

There are cost considerations here too. Employees often cost 120% of their salaries when you include benefits and taxes. In this post-pandemic era where companies want to be more nimble with their expenditures and their ability to hire/fire, contractors are often a sound choice. Many agencies are cheaper than a salaried employee with the added benefit of several experts working on a campaign versus one employee.

3 SaaS Pricing Models & Building a Strategy Around What Customers Value

Posted on by Daniel E. Lofaso

SaaS pricing models demonstrate the value of your features to convert subscribers. Use these software pricing strategies to optimize your SaaS pricing page now.

How do the most popular SaaS pricing models stack up against each other?

The SaaS industry grows more attractive every day, but how successful businesses are in this space has everything to do with the right pricing models.

Pricing has the highest impact on your profitability, growth, and customer retention.

Yet the average SaaS company decides its pricing model in less than one business day!

So when was the last time you analyzed your software pricing strategies?

If you’re interested in subscriber and revenue growth, this resource covers:

 

 

Pricing models make sure you’re capturing the most value from each of your customers. But there’s one strategy that’s better than the others.

Comparing the 3 Major SaaS Pricing Models

Let’s go over the benefits and drawbacks of the three most popular SaaS pricing models:

 
  1. Cost-plus pricing
  2. Competitor-based pricing
  3. Value-based pricing

 

Cost Plus Pricing

Cost-plus pricing sets the price of a service by evaluating the company’s costs and adding a markup percentage to earn revenue.

Pros

 
  • Simple math. It’s the most basic pricing strategy; you sell something for more than it costs to produce and earn revenue on the profit (difference).
  • Less work. When you know your expenses, you just need to experiment with profit margin percentages to find your sweet spot for growth. This profit margin often ranges between 5% and 20%.

 

Cons

 
  • Costs change over time. When you set up a cost-plus pricing model, your expenses will vary wildly from the start to months and years later. As you grow, you’ll need to factor in additional expenses, and your subscribers may not be into fluctuating price changes for every cost your business incurs. This may harm your retention rates.
  • It doesn’t target your audience. Your pricing strategy should reflect the value you provide buyers, not your cost of doing business. While you need to cover your expenses, this inward-focused approach doesn’t take the customer’s needs into consideration.
  • Less accuracy. Cost-plus doesn’t take into account all the other variables that go into pricing, such as market research, data analysis, etc.

 

Competitor Based Pricing

A competitor-based pricing model uses your competition’s prices as a benchmark. You can either copy their rates or fall somewhere in the middle of the high/low range.

Pros

 
  • It’s a logical starting point for new SaaS companies. If you don’t know how to price your services yet, you may try what your competitors are doing first and adjust from there.
  • It’s easy. All it takes is an afternoon of sleuthing your competitors to compile a list of prices to base yours on. Hover somewhere in the middle, and potential customers may gravitate to your company since you’re neither the cheapest nor the most expensive.

 

Cons

 
  • Allows your competitors to dictate your company’s trajectory. You have no idea how your competitors price. What if they never do pricing analysis? Copying their pricing doesn’t account for your goals or operating expenses, and may force you out of business.
  • Buyers won’t see your unique selling points (USPs) and may not find value in your service. Don’t regurgitate what’s out there; find your own lane and give people a reason to consider your company first. Using your competitors’ pricing shows potential subscribers you’re exactly the same (even though you’re better!). If you offer more value and a better experience, your prices should reflect that.

 

Value Based Pricing

Value-based pricing (also known as “value pricing”) prices your services in line with how much your target consumer thinks they’re worth.

Pros

 
  • It’s 100% customer-focused. To set value-based pricing, you’ll need to focus on a single customer segment (or buyer persona), determine which features they need to solve their problems, and find out how much they’re willing to pay a company to help them do so. It’s all about them.
  • Value pricing lets your USPs shine. When you highlight features that set your company apart, your prices put a value on that differentiation. Customers compare your unique features and see why they’re worth the price.
  • Attract the right buyer, retain subscribers, grow revenue. Targeted pricing helps your whole team — from sales to marketing and product packaging – attract more qualified leads and reduce subscriber churn.

 

Cons

 
  • It takes time and effort to understand your buyers inside and out. You’ll need to spend time on market research and customer outreach to truly understand your target consumer, how you’ll meet their needs, and still grow to earn a sizable profit.

 

Value-based pricing is the best SaaS pricing model, and the one you should be using now that you know the differences between the most popular software pricing strategies. Pricing is always a critical component of business strategy, but it’s even more important in a volatile economy. Consider these 4 Counterintuitive Pricing Strategy Tips for optimizing your pricing strategy.

So I’ll show you how to tackle this one downside next.

How To Use Buyer Personas to Build a SaaS Pricing Model

Quantified buyer personas are efficient and highly profitable. They give you all the data necessary to set smart pricing strategies.

Many SaaS companies only have a broad understanding of their target audience and never collect actionable data, or data you can use to earn a profit, about their distinct customer segments.

That all changes today.

First, Segment Your Customers Into Three To Five Individual Buyer Personas

Separate your highest value customers from the rest.

What do they all share in common? How are they different?

When you dive deep into the subscribers who already find the most value for your service, you can learn how to clone them and reach out to similar leads.

Learn as much as possible about these users and try to craft individual target buyers based on a few metrics like their:

 
  • Industry niche
  • Company size
  • Role within the company
  • Problems/challenges
  • Source of those problems/challenges
  • Most valued features of your service package
  • Least valued features of your service package
  • Features subscribers specifically upgrade to have
  • Most often used features
  • Least used features
  • Budget

 

Understanding your target audience helps you better position your service and pricing to best appeal to each demographic.

Start Asking Different Buyers Questions

Probe your loyal subscriber base for data to create your well-rounded customer segments.

Send out questionnaires or reach out directly to ask why they like your service, what features they’d also like, and how much they’d be willing to spend for specific upgrades.

Ask people to rate their answers on a scale of 1–10, with 10 being features they really like and 1 being those they care less about.

Through this data analysis and market research, you should find clear enough differences to segment your subscriber base.

Craft Pricing Models to Reflect Your Subscribers

Let’s say a chunk of subscribers craves more robust analytics while another wishes for better integration into their work systems.

Now you have two different packages to offer to two different customers.

Offer consumers multiple ways to find your service attractive, and you’ll grow your base and revenue.

So price out the costs of these features into attractive tiers that demonstrate value to these new, targeted segments.

Building Your Website’s SaaS Pricing Page (with Examples)

Your customers have a general idea of how much they’re willing to spend on features they need in a subscription software service.

Your pricing page should show them exactly what they’re getting for their subscription price.

Make it easy to understand or else no one’s signing up.

The best pricing page includes tiers with:

Identifying Demographics of Your Buyer Personas

Describe your buyer personas in one quick, fun term they’ll connect with.

Check out how website builder Wix breaks down their buyer personas:

They’ve segmented their buyer personas into defined tiers like “VIP” and “Pro.” Users can select the best fit based on who they are and what they need.

HubSpot also uses a similar strategy and clearly breaks the options down between Start, Professional, and Enterprise.

Coincidentally, these explanations emphasize which features each pricing plan prioritizes.

Bonus: Wix placed their most expensive tier on the left; this is a psychological strategy we recommend!

Targeted Features

Package your features according to what each buyer segment values most and show them what they’ll get for the price.

This allows you to target each personas’ pain points with solutions and strategies worth paying for.

Your value metric and which package fits their needs should be obvious to each buyer persona within seconds of landing on your pricing page.

Slack does this well:

Wix does this well again:

The tiers describe specific features found in each plan so consumers can compare what they’re getting for the price.

With a low entry point and a description for personal use, new subscribers can test the Wix waters with a Combo plan and score most features within their budget.

But as their website grows and becomes a business, they’ll earn features like $300 in Ad vouchers, a site booster app (worth $60), and a visitor analytics app (another $60 value) for a measly $4 bump up in subscription price to Unlimited.

These features and their value are clearly defined.

Bonus: Check out how Wix above (and G Suite below) highlight the targeted features for the option they think you’ll find most attractive.

Distinct Pricing Tiers

Distinct pricing points for each buyer persona shows consumers where they’ll start and how they’ll grow with your company.

But the more time it takes to understand your pricing, the less likely people will sign up.

G Suite does this in a digestible way:

Again, Wix makes it unbelievably easy to compare plans by price. There’s a clear delineation between the offered features and the budget of the buyer that tier is best suited for:

As you help subscribers solve problems, they’ll be more successful.

And as they grow in profitability, so will your SaaS company if it continues to scale up and offer features your growing subscriber base needs.

Bonus: Be careful not to have too many pricing tiers or you’ll risk analysis paralysis. That is, confusing prospects by giving them too many options to choose from.

Set Up the Best Pricing Page for Your SaaS Biz Now

Almost every SaaS company puts pricing models on the low end of the totem pole when aiming for subscriber growth and increased revenue. But now you know better.

Determine what your target audience values most and truly wants from your service via data and market research, and you’ll be in the best position to meet those needs at a profitable price point.

Knowing your buyers inside and out allows you to provide the right value at the right price to the right subscribers.

And that’s a recipe for success.

If you need help creating your pricing page or pricing strategy reach out to us today!

Best SaaS Websites by Design, Rankings and Traffic

Posted on by Daniel E. Lofaso

The desire for more software across collaborative, remote, and hybridized workforces has been great for the SaaS industry in recent years. 

Gartner has forecasted end-user spending on cloud-services to grow 21.7% from 2021 to 2022, highlighting the demand in the marketplace and inherent competitiveness that comes along with it.

Arguably, the core of this competitive landscape lies in your SaaS’ digital presence, further underscored by the attractiveness and effectiveness of your SaaS website.

Let’s look at some of the best SaaS websites with our own internal scoring system looking at design, rankings, and traffic. I’ve broken down the best SaaS sites into two buckets, one that primarily serves the enterprise market and one that primarily serves SMBs.

Best SaaS Websites Serving the Enterprise Market 

We have distinguished SaaS websites that cater to the enterprise market and SMB market because they tend to have a different look and feel. As you’ll see in these examples below, the enterprise-facing SaaS websites tend to be a bit more sterile, less risky with their color schemes and aesthetics, and somewhat predictable in their layouts. 

They are all beautifully-designed sites in their own right, but we’ll see more variation in design when we get to the SMB market.

Salesforce

Salesforce instantly pulls us in with their clean, trustworthy design backed by their blue and white color schemes and friendly Codey the Bear mascot. As a brand somewhat synonymous with the software cloud, you’d expect their site to live up to certain standards of exceptionalism.

Salesforce does a great job of blending animated elements with custom iconography as well as actual client pictures, and heavily relies on the resource section to provide a learning experience rather than solely pushing products and services. Their gratuitous use of whitespace coupled with strategically positioned CTAs make this website a win across all fronts.

Ranking & Traffic metrics: 

Salesforce is a juggernaut in the SEO space with nearly 900,000 ranked keywords, a traffic estimate of 4.3M visits a month, and a traffic value of $15.7M a month.

Steal this awesome SaaS design feature!

  • Consider a highly recognizable mascot for brand recall and to create an element that separates you from your competitors.

Paychex

According to Apps Run the World research firm, Paychex is the 10th largest payroll software provider in the world, paying one of every 12 American private-sector employees.

With this massive amount of clout you’d expect a very streamlined and corporate site. I like their no nonsense heading, singular CTA, and applicable hero image above the fold. Paychex does social proof the right way, with multiple sections dedicated to why customers use them, loads of testimonials, and a large recognition section. 

I also like the use of the primary takeaways of their solutions as succinct bullet points and attractive CTAs (ex. Run payroll your way).

Finally, the solution finder sections – one by business size and the other as a short conditional logic questionnaire, are fine-tuned for sales funnel brilliance.

Ranking & Traffic metrics: 

Paychex ranks for a respectable 218,000 keywords, drives an estimated 1.7M visits a month, and has organic traffic worth $4.5M.

Zendesk

Zendesk certainly embodies the corporate website look albeit with some risk-taking in terms of their dark background hero and multi-colored heading. An interesting design feature that is unique and attractive is the columnization of the heading (H1) and description statement. 

The rest of the site places an emphasis on resources immediately below the fold and then multiple case studies that serve to discuss how their products work in lieu of actual product sections. 

The bottom half of the site earns your trust with social proof in the form of an encapsulated  Gartner award and highly recognizale client logos before ending with some subtle links to some of their most popular articles.

Ranking & Traffic metrics: 

Zendesk ranks for nearly 300,000 keywords, drives an estimated 604,000 visits per month, and has a traffic value of an impressive $3.8M.

GitHub

The GitHub website is a primetime example of a brand that knows exactly who their buyer persona is and exactly how to cater to them with aesthetics and content. 

From their dark hero image with an animated globe and cartoon space cadet, to the perfectly contrasting CTA to sign up for GitHub, to their social proof of how far their reach goes, this site does it all. Do I even need to mention we are still talking above the fold!

What is unique about the GitHub website is their sub-section just below the fold with various benefit statements placed in a sub-menu that is easily-navigated with anchor links. This sub-section then becomes the sticky menu for the duration of downward scrolling, which is a unique design feature I have not seen anywhere else. 

The contents of this section are laser-focused on their buyer persona and are beautifully animated with screenshots and accompanying text before landing our space cadets down on a badass cartoon footer that makes even non-developers want to get out there and code.

Ranking & Traffic metrics: 

GitHub ranks for a massive 15.9M keywords, drives an estimated 32.5M visits a month, and has a traffic value of $18.1M.

Workday

Workday’s enterprise management cloud website goes hard in the paint with bold graphics and screenshots, a minimalist design, and lots of white space.

Workday seems to want its visitors come away with the idea that their software will simplify their worklives with succinct benefit statements, a large emphasis on client success stories, and a minimal use of text.

Compared to most enterprise websites, Workday does not have a lot going on the homepage. I believe this shows they are resting on their brand recognition somewhat in terms of their design, or have sort of built their homepage in a way that encourages visitors to click through to learn more. 

Ranking & Traffic metrics: 

Workday ranks for 134,000 keywords, drives an estimated 1.8M in traffic, and has a traffic value of $2.5M.

Segment

Segment, in my opinion, is one of the best SaaS websites on the internet right now. I really like how they seamlessly blend their brand colors into the whole site and make a dark aesthetic feel approachable when everyone else is banking on white backgrounds and the safe corporate look.

Where Segment shines, though, is with their custom graphic design elements that expertly tell a story of how their software works to connect customer data from all of your existing tools. They are a bit more subtle than most of the other enterprise SaaS sites we’ve featured in their use of social proof, but they do infuse a few instances of client logos and case studies into the site really well.

I like that Segment has also minimized their use of actual product screenshots as those can often take away from the aesthetics of a website. This is not to take away from the UX or UI of the actual software, this is just to say a beautiful site is not always complimented with software screenshots.

Ranking & Traffic metrics: 

Segment ranks for 80,900 keywords, drives an estimated 61,900 visits a month, and has a traffic value of $106k.

Steal this awesome SaaS design feature!

  • Create custom graphics using your brand colors that show how your software works.

Drift

Drift is another example of a (mostly) corporate-facing brand that has gone bold with their design, color schemes, and fonts.

Having purportedly invented the sector around “conversational marketing,” Drift does a good job of focusing their website design on having conversations, showing how they help you help your customers, and how to use their software to crush your customer service goals.

The bold in-your-faceness of the site may not be for everyone, but it certainly drives some excitement which is exactly what the brand is wanting to do.

Ranking & Traffic metrics: 

Drift ranks for 63,500 keywords, drives an estimated 516,000 visits a month, and has a traffic value of $108k.

Best SaaS Websites Serving the SMB Market 

As discussed earlier, there seems to be something of a distinct SaaS website design difference between those SaaS companies that serve enterprise clients and those that serve SMBs. The SMBs seem to “talk” more to small business owners, marketers, or those who have different goals than onboarding a software to 1,000s of employees. Note the distinction in the look and feel of these SaaS websites as you look through them to see if you agree.

Shopify

Shopify as a brand seems to have beaten it’s ecomm competitors SquareSpace and Wix to a pulp as me in the SEO and web design world never seem to have clients using either of those platforms.

Their website is unique as it does feel more like an online store than a SaaS website, but it is very approachable, easy to navigate, and the homepage seems to address all buyer hesitations right away.

The only oddly designed aspect of the website is the massive animated globe showcasing where the platform is used, which seems to be oddly placed in respect to the rest of the website.

Ranking & Traffic metrics: 

Shopify ranks for 1.2M keywords, drives an estimated 5.2M in organic traffic, and has a massive traffic value of $9.2M.

FreshBooks

Accounting software sites are getting more competitive these days and we honestly could have gone with a number of options here. What makes the FreshBooks site stand out, however, is their specific addressing of the small business owner market.

From their headings, to their image usage, to their section on use cases, this site is designed with the small business owner in mind.

The white and blue color palette has a psychological trust factor built in, and the beige background color in the hero image has a calming effect that subconsciously puts you at ease (something you want when dealing with your money!).

I like the FreshBooks features section which does an excellent job of showcasing eight separate features without taking up a huge section on the website.

The remainder of the site gets gold stars for usage of social proof, highlighting of integrations, and additional selling features around why SMBs love the software.

 Ranking & Traffic metrics: 

Freshbooks ranks for 514,000 keywords, drives 1M visits a month, and has an estimated traffic value of $1.5M.

Steal this awesome SaaS design feature!

  • When you have a lot of Features to showcase but don’t want to create massive sections on your page, consider a tab option like the below.

Mojo

Before telling you how great the Mojo website is, I have to mention that we built it! Mojo is an ecommerce landing page software that made it big with the direct response industry and carved out a nice niche catering to a very specific clientele. 

The whole concept behind this web design was ease of use. From the language, to the light and thin fonts, to the actual screen recording of the software, and the integrations section, everything about the site is supposed to showcase how seamless this software is.

As a niche SaaS brand, we emphasized unique selling propositions such as its robust feature sets, its industry-specific effectiveness, and its use cases.

 Ranking & Traffic metrics: 

Mojo ranks for 408 keywords, drives an estimated 72 organic visits a month, and has a traffic value of $238.

Client Savvy

Client Savvy is another Digital Elevator website client that we recently finished up and will be bringing on to do SaaS SEO. Their service relies heavily on a software offering coupled with personalized consulting. 

As such, the design needed to blend their client experience software alongside the knowledge that their tools are accompanied by humans. We used the hero area to emphasis the offering along with mentions of the software and advisory services within testimonials, and another layer or partner organizations – the client did not want to showcase their clients for fear of them being poached by competitors – to provide instant credibility.

The remainder of the site incorporates software screenshots along with custom graphic design elements to soften the aesthetic and showcase the product. A bold CTA towards the footer with a distinct background color rounds out this corporate small business SaaS site.

 Ranking & Traffic metrics: 

Client Savvy ranks for 269 keywords, drives an estimated 54 visits in organic traffic, and has zero traffic value.

BambooHR

BambooHR gives you the feel-goods from the moment you hit the homepage with their organic color schemes and smiling faces. Their unique use of bamboo shoots graphics features actual business owners and their hero section also has an interesting use of a small resource slider that provides a friendly cohesiveness that is really approachable.

The background graphics pull you down the page. You’ll find no abrupt sectionality on this site, each section sort of blends nicely into the next with fun geometric shapes and soft corners.

Further down the page there is ample use of white space isolated the product’s benefits with testimonials and professional pictures of their actual clients.

The climax of the homepage is the mascot (remember Salesforce?) and a huge panda encapsulating a free trial CTA.

 Ranking & Traffic metrics: 

BambooHR ranks for 169,000 keywords, drives an estimated 636,000 visits per month, and has a traffic value of $1.1M per month.

Steal this awesome SaaS design feature!

  • Go bold with your footer and have a large, cohesive CTA section where you go after demos, trialists, or sales.

HubSpot

HubSpot could have easily been featured in the SaaS websites that serve enterprise customers example but they arguably service more SMBs than enterprise clients on a sheer volume basis. 

This site gets updated a lot, but at the current time of this writing they have gone with a corporate feel and a hero section that focuses on one CTA, their CRM. HubSpot, like so many other SaaS companies on this list, offers a number of different products so the takeaway here is that sometimes it is better to draw attention to one of your offerings rather than try to cover all of them in one message. When the time is right, it is likely they will update the hero and homepage to cover another one of their products.

HubSpot is a content marketing powerhouse, so it makes sense their homepage may be succinct compared to other SaaS websites on this list.

After the hero, they showcase their solutions, focus on a USP – their community, and end with some social proof and a final CTA.

 Ranking & Traffic metrics: 

HubSpot is a leader in marketing content, and their rankings for 377,000 keywords backs that up. They drive an estimated 1.3M visits a month and have a traffic value of $7M a month.

Harvest

Time tracking software leader Harvest has some unique design features that have gone towards the calming and relaxed aesthetic. With their soft, almost peach background color and muted gradients, the brand gives a soothing feel to the otherwise chaotic task of time-tracking.

Their use of thin sans-serif fonts reinforces this look, and their custom graphics and iconography blend expertly into the rest of the site.

With a powerful use of social proof in client logos just below the fold and a singular use of a product screenshot, the brand keeps the design elements simple, minimalist, and straightforward.

Above the footer, Harvest does the opposite of what most SaaS websites do in that they end the page with a light, rather than dark, CTA element that stands out against the other colors. 

Ranking & Traffic metrics: 

Harvest ranks for 31,600 keywords, drives 169,000 visits a month, and has a traffic value of $177k.

Mux

Of all the streaming industry sites that have popped up as of late, the Mux website probably has done the best job of putting together a well-strategized website.

They don’t mash their primary solutions into one hero area, rather, they focus on their Video solution on the homepage and treat it as their product page which is an interesting and respectable approach.

They have a high energy red-orange secondary color pulled from their logo that they use to great effect with their CTA buttons and some fonts. It contrasts seamlessly with the clean white background and bold, simple fonts.

Their hero animation tells the story of code to video, and the subtle social proof of client logos flows nicely into another wonderfully colorful section on benefit statements.

Like the GitHub website, Mux does an excellent job of speaking directly to its buyer persona with coding examples mixed with benefit statements that really showcase what the platform can do.

A smart data section with a light background breaks up the site before it all culminates with some credible social proof and the traditional dark pre-footer CTA.

Ranking & Traffic metrics: 

Although they have an impressive 73 Domain Rating, Mux does not have much to brag about in terms of keywords, organic traffic, or traffic value (196, 16, and $1, respectively). Having firsthand experience in the streaming industry, I feel this more likely due to the infancy of the industry as a whole and keyword data still catching up to what potential users are looking for.

Steal this awesome SaaS design feature!

  • Break up the background colors of your site with full-width sections that encapsulate important information like Mux does here.

Sendinblue

Fun seems to be the trend with most email SaaS providers these days. Sendinblue brings the fun home with their custom animation of a business owner – presumably you – scaling from bike, to car, to van, to flying fan in what is supposed to be the echo chamber of what it can do for your business.

With a trustworthy blue and white color palette, Sendinblue plays off the colors in it’s logo effectively while providing some additional pops of color as you navigate down the page. 

I really like the third-party social proof in the form of the rankings on other websites (and the accompanying graphic).

The benefit statement section is a cleanly designed example of how to showcase a lot of Solutions without overwhelming the viewer with loads of information.

In the social proof section down the page, the transitioning use of client logos builds a lot of trust and credibility before ending the site with bolder colors and a final CTA.

Ranking & Traffic metrics: 

Sendinblue ranks for a very respectable 67,400 keywords, drives an estimated 157,000 visits, and has a traffic value of $613,000.

Steal this awesome SaaS design feature!

  • If you have some awesome third-party recognition, don’t be afraid to show it off with a dedicated section on your homepage.

Helium

The introduction of crypto websites has introduced a new look and feel to the SaaS realm. From what I’m seeing, crypto sites like Helium tend to utilize dark backgrounds and bolder aesthetics than other SaaS sites.

This site specifically uses a black background with a secondary logo color and two other complimentary colors throughout. The hero area has some subtle animation but it’s really the remainder of the site that I like.

Cryptocurrency websites, by nature, have a responsibility to build trust and Helium does this by immediately showcasing its latest news and outlet logos to establish credibility in the coin.

The angular breaks in sections and color schemes lead the visitor section-to-section and the graphics in the device mining section give me sort of an Apple design feel. 

Overall, the site does a really good job of maintaining the common styles expected for a crypto site while brining into play modern web design elements – bold text and colors – alongside generous portions of social proof.

Ranking & Traffic metrics: 

For a crypto site, Helium drives an impressive amount of SEO stats. They rank for 16,700 keywords, drive an estimated 305,000 visits per month, and have a traffic value of $47k.

Best SaaS Websites Takeaways

These are some of our (me and the Digital Elevator team) personal favorite SaaS web designs right now. Many of them follow current design trends and have a similar look and feel, while others venture out and bring a bolder approach to aesthetics and color schemes. 

It seems the favorite designs on our team are the ones that really know who their buyer persona is and how to echo their wants and needs in a site. 

For example: Salesforce wants you to feel confident in them as a corporate powerhouse, so they use whites and blue and some fun mascots; GitHub goes heavy with a design heavy aesthetic to cater to developers; Harvest uses a calming color scheme to bring order to the chaotic world of time tracking.

When designing your next SaaS website ask yourself ‘What do my prospects expect to feel when they land on our site?’ The answer to that question is likely the direction you want your design team to take.

If you want help designing your next SaaS website, reach out to the awesome team at Digital Elevator to discuss your goals today.

SaaS PPC Tips for TOF, MOF, BOF (Sales Funnels)

Posted on by Daniel E. Lofaso
https://youtu.be/9qfPsgNql1g

In our years of running custom PPC campaigns for SaaS companies, we’ve learned a trick or two about appropriate use of funds and targeting the right audience across the top (TOF), middle (MOF), and bottom (BOT) of the sales funnels 

Where we see most companies (PPC agencies or self-managed PPC) get it wrong is by only targeting one part of the funnel instead of all three.

Below, we’ll look at the sales funnel and some tactics we consider when running PPC campaigns for our SaaS clients.

A Quick Review on the Top, Middle & Bottom of the Sales Funnel

  • Top of the Funnel: At the top of the funnel, you are driving awareness to your brand. These people may not know who you are, and your marketing efforts generally assume as much.
  • Middle of the Funnel: After awareness of your SaaS in the product mix, the middle of the funnel is where you help showcase why you should be considered amongst your competitors.
  • Bottom of the Funnel: The bottom of the funnel is where the key conversions happen and where you convince users to demo and purchase your SaaS over the others.

Here’s an example of Larry, our made-up persona, moving through the funnel. Larry is a product lead at a large fitness brand and is involved in video content creation and distribution.

SaaS Ads Example

A SaaS prospect is targeted at the top of the funnel:

Larry is on LinkedIn and sees a promotion for a free white paper on a recent guide to optimizing digital video infrastructure. Larry clicks the download button and is granted instant access to a well-made white paper from a brand he’s never heard of. Larry learns a lot from the white paper and keeps it on file with the plan to show to his team on the engineering side of the business. 

The SaaS prospect moves to the middle of the funnel:

Six weeks later, Larry is at a meeting with his executive team and shares some of his insights on digital video infrastructure optimization that he thinks will work for the company. The C-suite tells Larry to find some potential vendors in the space that may help them with their goals. In addition to performing Google searches for video distribution software companies, Larry sees a retargeting ad from the initial company he downloaded the white paper from and requests a demo. He also schedules a few demos with other companies whose ads he clicked on. 

The Saas prospect moves to the bottom of the funnel:

After meeting with four potential vendors, Larry makes the recommendation to the C-suite to use the services of the initial vendor he received the white paper from. Subconsciously, Larry felt that the educational experience he went through gave that company the most credibility to solve his companies challenges with video distribution. 

This example plays out every day across the web, with additional layers trickled in that I’ve left out (such as email marketing to Larry, webinar invites, and Larry’s further research on the topic with blogs and other forms of organic content marketing). 

Now that we know some PPC sales funnel use cases, let’s look at more specific examples for each stage of the funnel.

Top of the Funnel PPC Campaign Examples

Here are a few examples of top-of-the-funnel PPC campaigns we’ve run for select clients to help bring awareness to their business and begin to drive traffic.

White Paper / eBook Promotion Campaign

Channel: LinkedIn

Target audience: Interest & Position Based

Ad type: Leadgen forms

A white paper or eBook can be a powerful asset when building an inbound marketing strategy to your SaaS, but it needs to be in front of the right people to turn that investment into a success.

We recently ran a lead generation white paper PPC campaign for a SaaS healthcare client that boasted some good results. After a couple of months, we managed to get the CPL to around $40.

SaaS PPC Tips for TOF, MOF, BOF (Sales Funnels)

While this CPL may not be a good benchmark for every SaaS industry, for this client it was. For starters, their average client value was around $400,000 per year, with a lifetime value in the seven-figure range. Secondly, we were targeting a very niche market of a niche market (yes, a niche of a niche) so the net we could cast was rather narrow but made for a perfect LinkedIn campaign.

Pro Tip:

It is critical to direct people to a ‘gate’ rather than the actual content with white papers or eBooks. The point is to gain their contact information (which LinkedIn takes care of without much friction) and start them in the sales funnel. Therefore, it is recommended to build a landing page to download the asset on-site after the leads fill out the form on LinkedIn as opposed to directing these leads to your asset directly from LinkedIn (note that you can’t retarget from PDF links which is why we send them to a landing page).

With the recommended approach, you gain the following benefits that you wouldn’t if you’d just used LinkedIn’s form alone:

  1. You direct people to your website giving the opportunity to learn more about your brand and engage with your content.
  2. You provide yourself an opportunity to retarget these visitors based on the way they interact with your site. For example, if they landed on your gated page and made it to a software demo page, you’d want to retarget them with ads that encourage them to try a demo.
  3. You provide an optional opportunity to move further down the conversion funnel, should they want, like in the example below.
SaaS PPC Tips for TOF, MOF, BOF (Sales Funnels)

Steps to take to emulate a top of the funnel SaaS white paper campaign like this:

  1. Create a meaningful white paper your ideal customer would be interested in
  2. Build a landing page to promote your white paper
  3. Launch a LinkedIn PPC campaign using Lead Gen Forms (and connect your CRM)
  4. Redirect your leads to your landing page 

Social Video Demo Campaign 

Channel: Facebook

Target audience: Interest & Position Based

Ad type: Video Ad / Video Carousel

Facebook offers very detailed targeting options, such as by job title, household income, business industry, etc. Therefore, it is usually an excellent way to increase the reach of important content from a content marketing perspective by boosting it and reaching targeted audiences in their streams. 

Check out this top-of-the-funnel social video demo from WeTransfer as an example.

SaaS PPC Tips for TOF, MOF, BOF (Sales Funnels)

This video demo on Facebook sums up their software offering in 24 seconds with a clean CTA:  Share files up to 2GB for free. No login is required.

Oddly, this desktop example has no clear call to action although the mobile example we saw from the Aaron Zakowski site does.

Middle of the Funnel PPC Campaign Examples

Branded Search-based Competitor Targeting

Channel: Google Ads 

Target audience: Keyword based

Ad type: Search campaign 

In a nutshell, AdWords competitor targeting is simply bidding on the branded search terms for the biggest competitors in your space.

Check out how YuJa bid on their competitors’ search term “kaltura pricing.” 

SaaS PPC Tips for TOF, MOF, BOF (Sales Funnels)

This is a smart SaaS PPC technique for a number of reasons:

  1. It allows you to bring brand awareness to searches who are already in the middle stages of the buying cycle.
  2. It allows you to go after higher intent keywords such as “pricing” that clearly indicate a searcher is closer to a decision-making process.
  3. It allows you to go after what are often high volume, low cost keywords.
  4. It allows you to get creative with your unique selling proposition (USP) to encourage click-throughs.

There are two main hooks (used in your heading) you can use to steal branded clicks:

  • Offer better pricing 
  • Create a value proposition that competitors don’t address

Note: YuJu’s use of “Platform Migration Toolkits” language in their ad is not super relevant from an intent perspective. A query for “Kaltura pricing” likely has the intent of someone searching for pricing and who is likely still shopping around. The language used seems to be geared towards someone who is wanting to migrate from existing software and would likely use a different search query.

However, YuJa’s landing page does live up to the promise of being a great comparison page to Kaltura and provides unique selling propositions in different ways.

SaaS PPC Tips for TOF, MOF, BOF (Sales Funnels)

For starters, YuJa goes right at Kaltura with their heading “Alternative and Replacement for Kaltura”. This also showcases that YuJa is matching their landing page content with the direct competitors that are used in the ads.

They could have used vague “Enterprise Video Platform”  language but instead, mention Kaltura specifically and likely have several iterations of this landing page (and competitor search campaigns) for all of their competitors.

There isn’t any distinct USP as to why YuJa is better than Kaltura but they do provide some social proof  to help with the consideration of this software in their mentions of companies that have made the switch:

SaaS PPC Tips for TOF, MOF, BOF (Sales Funnels)

Here’s another example.

A search for “Basecamp pricing” takes me to an ad on a Monday.com landing page with the below USP comparison table. Monday.com uses a grid to showcase their USPs which, in this case, are features.

SaaS PPC Tips for TOF, MOF, BOF (Sales Funnels)

Pro Tip:

We recommend segmenting competitors based on the above factors and creating landing pages and ads accordingly. In addition, we recommend creating a customized landing page for various competitors, such as a “vs.” page, emphasizing the benefit of your SaaS over competitors’ services to improve conversion rates. 

Retargeting with Webinars

Webinars can be a really powerful SaaS tool when done correctly. And because “done correctly” is a very ambiguous statement, here’s a really good resource on evergreen SaaS webinars where you can learn the ropes.

Before going deeper, it should be noted that webinars can really serve the middle and top of the funnel well, but here, we will focus on a middle of the funnel example.

We recently created a good breakdown on how to run effective PPC marketing funnels on Facebook that utilize webinars in the middle of the funnel.

Here’s a breakdown of how that works:

  1. ToF: First, create a blog that resonates with your target audience and send paid traffic to it to get brand awareness up and build trust with our free resource. This traffic will serve as the retargeting piece of the pie.
  2. MoF: Next, retarget these blog viewers, this time with an invite to join a webinar.
  3. BoF: Finally, with an additional retargeting layer, the website visitor and the website visitor who opted in and watched the webinar are targeted once more, this time for a more direct call to action to book an appointment.

While the blog initially drives interest and brand awareness, it’s the webinar that pushes people over the edge to move into that consideration mode.

Below is an example of a retargeting ad for a webinar from Neil Patel.

SaaS PPC Tips for TOF, MOF, BOF (Sales Funnels)

Honorable mentions for middle-of-the-funnel PPC strategies:

  • Non-branded search: The most obvious of all Google Ads campaigns, non-branded searches target specific high intent keywords related to your SaaS.
  • Branded search: The targeting of your company’s name in search results to take up real estate in the search results and to protect your brand from competitors who are trying to do the same.
  • Product and Pricing Page Based Retargeting: Retargeting users who visited specific product pages and the pricing page with ads. For example:
    • Offer: Discount + show competitor comparison landing page to address buyer hesitation
  • Engagement Based Retargeting: Retargeting users who spent 4m+ on a high converting blog page.
    • Offer: Free Trial or Demo

Bottom of the Funnel PPC Campaign Examples

Bottom of the funnel is the most fun aspect of paid marketing because you are targeting people who are the most likely to buy.  

One of the best ways to know who is most likely to buy is based on their behavior. Assuming you have cookies setup on your site you can retarget specific users (by behavior) who you think are most likely to make a purchase.

Let’s go back to the hypothetical Larry example.

Larry visited Monday.com from the ad he clicked when he searched for “Basecamp pricing.” Larry thought Monday.com was pretty cool, and Monday.com thought Larry was pretty cool too, targeting him with display ads for their project management software because they knew, from Larry’s previous behavior on the project management software comparison page, there was a pretty good chance he might soon be in the market for some PM software.

Turns out Monday.com was right, and Larry quickly moved from the awareness stage into the decision stage. Larry indicated this by visiting Monday.com’s pricing page several times, four in fact. At that time, Monday.com triggered additional retargeting ads to actually make it difficult for Larry to pass up the opportunity to use their software via a special promotion.

Because Monday.com’s goal was to get Larry to make a purchase, and they’d seen that he’d visited their pricing page four times, they knew the time was right to send Larry a unique pricing incentive to finally get him to convert.

Behavior-based Retargeting SaaS Prospects 

Channel: Google Ads

Target audience: Activity-based

Ad type: Display ads

As we saw in the example of retargeting ads to close Larry, we learned that creating an audience based on their behavior, and an offer unique to that behavior,  will increase the likelihood you’ll get results. Of course, retargeting in and of itself is not inherently bottom-of-the-funnel, but it is arguably the best bottom-of-the-funnel PPC tactic for SaaS companies.

When designing your bottom-of-the-funnel offer, make sure it is aligned with the goals of your company and the list you are promoting, especially if you are targeting multiple areas of your software. 

Here are some potential retargeting campaigns you can run with some conditional logic that would take the user into consideration:

  • Pricing Page Abandonment: Users who spent 1m+ on the pricing page but moved away / exited without conversion
    • Offer: Discount
  • Checkout Abandonment: Users who visited your checkout page but never converted
    • Offer: Offer a time-sensitive discount

If there are other paths users can take on your site that will logically make you say ‘hey, that guy is probably very interested in our service’ then you may want to create a retargeting list with them and hit them with ads.

Branded Search for High Buyer Intent Keywords

Above, we referenced using branded search for middle-of-the-funnel-type opportunities related to specific brands (ex. Basecamp pricing).

But you can also use branded search to go after bottom-of-the-funnel queries. 

For example, check out this ad for a “Google sheets and QuickBooks” search:

SaaS PPC Tips for TOF, MOF, BOF (Sales Funnels)

And the corresponding Zapier landing page:

SaaS PPC Tips for TOF, MOF, BOF (Sales Funnels)

Zapier creates bottom-of-the-funnel pages (for search and ads) for people looking for integration software.

PPC for SaaS Takeaways

If you learn one thing today it should be that the most successful SaaS PPC campaigns involve targeting across all the sales stages. Meeting your prospects’ intent with ads, landing pages, and offers is the most effective way to reduce ineffective ad spending, and move those users down the sales funnel.

5 SaaS Email Campaigns for Kick-Ass Start-Ups

Posted on by Daniel E. Lofaso

5 SaaS Email Marketing Campaigns for Higher Conversion Rates

You’d probably agree with me when I say that SaaS marketing is different from traditional marketing. SaaS marketing is almost entirely digital, the amount of product licenses you can sell are endless, and sales can happen extremely fast. Just a few clicks if you’re lucky.

But as a SaaS marketer, you don’t want to be lucky, you want to be smart. And if you know anything about selling software as a service, you know that email marketing can help. 

Today I’m going to outline five distinct SaaS email marketing campaigns that will help you with your goal of increasing your conversion rates and taking visitors, to trialists, to premium users.

The SaaS Sales Funnel

Before we get into the SaaS marketing emails let’s look at the traditional SaaS funnel.

SaaS sales funnel

Before we get into the SaaS marketing emails let’s look at the traditional SaaS funnel.

If this looks anything like your growth funnel, you should probably have some customer behavior type emails for each of the steps. The goal of these emails is to move your leads down the funnel, through the sale, and to a step many overlook, to retention.

Why is awareness of this funnel so important?

Knowing which stage in your funnel your SaaS prospect is in helps you create the right messages at the right time. As you understand your prospect and how they move through the different stages of your funnel, you’ll also set different SaaS email marketing goals depending on your customer’s relationship with your brand.

SaaS Sales Funnel Examples: Sweet Definitions of Customer Relations with Your Brand

Your software company probably has a nice bucket for the types of customers you have and the messaging you might want to create around them. These buckets are defined by their behavior with your brand.

Most software companies also focus heavily on customer acquisition and moving prospects into their sales funnel, through the brand awareness stage on to the trial stage, and beyond. 

Hot Prospects

Active Trialists

Inactive Trialists

Active Users

Inactive Users

Self-Serve Upgrades

ATTRACT
Hot Prospects

These are users who have visited your site more than three times and did something promising like visited your pricing or demo page more than one time in the last 30 days.

CONVERT
Active Trialists

Users who signed-up (and have provided their emails or more) in the last 14 days AND uploaded contacts to the software.

CONVERT
Inactive Trialists

Users who signed-up (and have provided their emails or more) within the last 30 days but have not logged-in to activate their accounts.

CLOSE
Active Users

Paying users who have logged in within the last seven days.

CLOSE
Inactive Users

Paying users who have not logged in within the last 30 days.

DELIGHT
Self-Serve Upgrades

Paying users who have upgraded to new product or feature sets within the last 30 days.

These are just a few of the many examples of users of modern SaaS businesses. For the most part, these define the entire sales cycle, which is why it is so important to use SaaS email marketing to communicate with each of them.

The SaaS Email Marketing Messaging Framework

As we have seen, there are many types of messages you can craft based on the Attract, Convert, Close, Delight stages. Here is a visual of how we want to drive customer engagement as we take someone from Attract to Delight:

Before we can move on to new messaging, we first want to ensure a customer has taken the steps needed to get there. These messages are based on the behavior, either positive or negative, of a customer. You can get really sophisticated with this type of messaging, but the process of this messaging framework is easy to understand. 

5 SaaS Email Marketing Campaigns for Moving Customers Down Your Funnel

Acquisition Email

Free Trial Activation

Freemium User Activation

Freemium User Upgrade

Delight

Acquisition Email

The Acquisition Email is at the top of your funnel. Your SaaS’ definition of “acquisition” may be different from the guy down the street. These days, “acquisition” can mean anything from an email earned from a free eBook, when someone signs up for your blog, or a hotter prospect who has signed up for a free trial. Regardless, you will need someone’s email before you can use it in your campaign.

Campaign Goal: Move prospect from email prospect to sign-up.

Campaign Kicks-off When: Prospect has visited the demo/trial page more than twice AND has visited your pricing page at least once in the last 30 days. A more aggressive approach would kick this off once you get an email from any source.

Messaging Strategy: These prospects are still very much in the information-gathering stage and are yet to have committed to anything. They are probably doing the same thing on your competitor’s site. If your emails help them determine why you are a better fit, you’ll have a better chance of moving them down your funnel.

The Acquisition Email Flow

EMAIL CADENCE CONTENT
Email 1:
Thank you for your interest		 Immediately after sign-up Thank the prospect for their interest and lets them know WHY they need your software
Follow-up 1:
Sell USP		 2 days after Message 1
IF prospect has not signed up		 Discuss the unique selling proposition of your product and specify benefits
Follow-up 2:
CEO mission statement		 1 day after Follow-up 1
IF prospect has not signed up		 Check-in from CEO thanking them and discussing why the software was created and the problems it solves. Should have no CTA.
Follow-up 3:
Benefits overview		 2 days after Follow-up 2
IF prospect has not signed up		 Go over all the features AND benefits to the user
Feedback 15 days after Follow-up 3
IF prospect has not signed up		 Personalized email from CEO or head of marketing looking for feedback on why signup never occurred
Acquisition Email Flow

Free Trial Activation

Free trials, as opposed to freemium (more on that next), are used generate value within a given period of time (usually 7, 14, or 30 days). The idea is that after using the software, the prospect will be hooked and upgrade before the trial ends.

Use Free Trial Activation emails to your advantage by playing to the expiration date of the trial itself.

Campaign Goal: Get prospects to use software enough to get value and convert to paid upgrades.

Campaign Kicks-off When: Prospect signs up for trial.

Messaging Strategy: Use the cadence of messages to your advantage by being frequent with your messaging. The users are “on-the-clock” so to speak, so don’t be afraid to use urgency to your advantage.

Free Trial Activation Email Flow

EMAIL CADENCE CONTENT
Email 1:
Thank you for your interest		 Immediately after sign-up Thank prospect for signing up for the trial. Sends them a checklist or video of what the exact next steps are.
Follow-up 1:
Value reminder		 1 day after Message 1
IF prospect has not ‘activated’ account		 Discuss the main focus of software and how it will help them. Trial period reminder.
Follow-up 2:
CEO mission statement		 1 day after Follow-up 1
IF prospect has not ‘activated’ account		 Check-in from CEO thanking them and discussing why the software was created and why it was created. Should have no CTA.
Follow-up 3:
Encouragement		 1 day after Follow-up 2
IF prospect has not ‘activated’ account		 Remind prospect it only takes ‘X’ amount of time to activate an account and get value. Trial period reminder.
Follow-up 4:
Encouraging nudge 		 2 days after Follow-up 3
IF prospect has not ‘activated’ account		 Another encouraging nudge to activate an account. Highlight time left in trial.
Follow-up 5:
Trial expiration reminder		 13 days after sign-up
IF prospect has not ‘activated’ account		 The trial ends tomorrow and a sense of missing out should be established. Offer extension.
Follow-up 6:
Trial expiration		 15 days after sign-up
IF prospect has not ‘activated’ account		 Let the user know their trial is over. Encourage them to contact sales to extend and showcase testimonials.
Feedback 30 days after sign-up
IF prospect has not ‘activated’ account		 Personalized email from CEO or head of marketing looking for feedback on why a prospect didn’t move ahead with your product. Make it easy to respond, like a short multiple-choice survey.
Long-term Nurture 90 days after sign-up
IF prospect has not ‘activated’ account		 Don’t rule out users who signed up but didn’t move forward. Put them on long-term nurture or at the very least, add them to your blog email list.
Free Trial Activation Email Flow

Freemium User Activation

The email campaign for freemium users is like that of Free Trialists, with the exception that these users don’t have the clock working against them. Freemium users need to find value very quickly though, as getting them to use your product is what leads them to eventual upgrades.

Campaign Goal: Get prospects to use software immediately and frequently.

Campaign Kicks-off When: Prospect signs up for free account.

Messaging Strategy: Freemium users know that they are only getting a portion of the product that a paying customer gets, but still need to find value in the software. The messaging needs to reflect the value add of the product to encourage immediate and frequent use, meaning your psychology should make them feel like they are missing out if they don’t activate the software to get all the benefits.

Freemium User Activation Email Flow

EMAIL CADENCE CONTENT
Email 1:
Thank you for your interest		 Immediately after sign-up Thank prospect for signing up for the freemium model. Discuss a high-level view of the benefits of the software.
Follow-up 1:
Your first step		 Same day as Email 1
IF prospect has not ‘activated’ account		 Walk your user down the path of the first steps to start using the software.
Follow-up 2:
Social proof		 1 day after Follow-up 1
IF prospect has not ‘activated’ account		 Testimonials combined with brief case studies of how users get the value of your software.
Follow-up 3:
Encouragement		 1 day after Follow-up 2
IF prospect has not ‘activated’ account		 Remind prospect it only takes ‘X’ amount of time to activate an account and get value. Let them know the value they’re missing out on.
Follow-up 4:
Discuss features 		 2 days after Follow-up 3
IF prospect has not ‘activated’ account		 Perhaps the user has not found time to activate. Try to find another angle by discussing other secondary features.
Follow-up 5:
Personalized ask		 30 days after sign-up
IF prospect has not ‘activated’ account		 Personalized email from CEO or head of marketing looking for feedback on why the prospect has not activated.
Long-term Nurture 60 days after sign-up
IF prospect has not ‘activated’ account		 Don’t rule out users who signed up but didn’t move forward. Put them on long-term nurture or at the very least, add them to your blog email list.
Freemium User Activation Email Flow

Freemium User Upgrade to Paying Account

It is likely that you already have an upgrade section inside your software. However, it is more likely that you’ll get people to take notice of this action via email than through their dashboards. But you don’t want to promote upgrade actions too soon; users need time to use your software to get value out of it. Value is what will lead them to a sale.

Thus, you’ll want to create triggers for email automation that are tied to account usage and upgrade triggers. These can be volume triggers, feature triggers, account triggers or some combination of the three. No matter the trigger for the upgrade messaging, you’ll want to try and define when a user might want to pay more, when they find value based on your metrics, and how to target these engaged users so you reach them at the right time.

Campaign Goal: Get freemium users to convert to paid users.

Campaign Kicks-off When: Prospect is activated and meets a defined upgrade trigger.

Messaging Strategy: Your messaging will depend entirely on the type of software you are offering. If you have software where the freemium usage is limited by volume (like Dropbox), you want to create a trigger to deploy emails around capacity limits. If you have feature-based software, you’ll need to promote the features they’re missing out on. These emails will be spread out more than the others.

Freemium User Upgrade to Paying Account Email Flow

EMAIL CADENCE CONTENT
Email 1:
Intro to premium options		 Once a prospect has been activated AND logged into the software Commend them on making a smart decision, remind them of a value play, and gently mention premium features with soft CTA.
Follow-up 1:
Social proof		 5 days after Message 1
IF prospect has not upgraded AND has logged in more than once in the last 5 days		 User has demonstrated interest, so feed them a case study with solid metrics related to premium software usage.
Follow-up 2:
Something to lose		 10 days after Follow-up 1
IF prospect has not upgraded AND has logged in more than once in the last 5 days		 Offer a temporary promotion with special pricing to incentivize people to a sale while creating urgency.
Follow-up 3:
Benefits overview		 30 days after Follow-up 2
IF prospect has not upgraded AND has logged in more than once in the last 5 days		 Don’t rule out users who signed up but didn’t move forward. Put them on long-term nurture or at the very least, add them to your blog email list.
Freemium User Upgrade to Paying Account Email Flow

Delight Paying Customers for Retention

Your paying customers should certainly not be overlooked or ignored once they jump onboard. They need to be kept abreast of new features, valuable content like blogs or whitepapers, company happenings, webinars, events, and conferences.

This can be as simple as using your blog to announce all new features and updates, and simply having all customers on the blog email list. 

Campaign Goal: Continue to engage paying customers with value adds.

Campaign Kicks-off When: Customer begins paying.

Messaging Strategy: As every company adds new features, publishes new content, and announces updates at their own pace, the approaches for delighting customers will vary. The key here is consistency and to let your customer know you are continually providing value or working on things that provide more value to their lives.

Delight Paying Customers for Retention Email Flow

EMAIL CADENCE CONTENT
Email 1:
Survey		 10 days after started paying AND has shown activity Send over survey to give feedback on the software, customer service, wants/needs
Follow-up 1:
Latest blogs		 As published or rounded up once a month An email highlighting one blog and showcasing several others
Follow-up 2:
Feature promotion		 1 month before rollout Introduce new feature, sell benefits, and give an estimate of the rollout
Follow-up 3:
Feature rollout		 30 days after Follow-up 2
IF featured has been rolled out		 Announce rollout of a new feature, explain benefits, show how to use it
Feedback 15 days after Follow-up 3
IF prospect has not used the new feature		 Personalized email from CEO or head of marketing looking for feedback on software
Delight Paying Customers for Retention Email Flow

Higher Conversion Rates Start with Customer Engagement

As we have seen, the touchpoints for customer engagement vary based on the behavior and lifecycle of your customers. With this guide, you’ll be able to formulate some meaningful touchpoints based on the customer journey and drive your customers down a path to financial prosperity.

While these email marketing campaigns are just guides, they will help you think subjectively about your customer’s journey, what may be holding them back from moving forward with your product, and how you can improve their hesitation. While you improve this journey, your products and processes may change as well. That is perfectly ok and to be expected. 

Just like your software, your marketing will continually be refined, and you may find that you have many more marketing campaigns for different types of prospects, leads, or paying customers. 

Have fun with your email messaging and show your personality. If you created a great product you can showcase that in your messages. If you need help with your emails or your overall SaaS marketing campaign, we can help with that too.

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