Customer Success Emails Done Right

In SaaS marketing where customers’ journeys are actually never-ending (at least we wish they were), customer relationship management is paramount to the business success.

One of the effective ways to build stronger connections with your SaaS platform users is to set up customer success email automation.

An effective customer success email marketing strategy will reduce churn and increase your customer lifetime value, which is one of the most essential metrics of any successful subscription business.

What are Customer Success Emails?

Put simply, customer success emails help your customers achieve success when using your platform.

Customer success emails aim at decreasing customer churn and increasing your upsells.

Further reading: 6 Ways to Measure Customer Success

Types of Customer Success Emails

By definition, there may be lots of types if customer success emails, including:

• Welcome email (Once a user join your trial or becomes your freemium user)
• Trial expiration email (To successfully steer customer into becoming your paying user)
• Feature explanation email (When your customer upgrades to gain access to a new feature)
• Payment recovery email (When a payment fails)
• Re-activation email (Targeting users who haven’t logged in to your platform for a while). A “We Miss You” email is a simple way to remind inactive customers of your platform and how they can benefit from it.
• Upsell email (When a user seems to be a good candidate to an upsell)
• Cart abandonment email (When a user adds something to their cart and leaves without paying),
• Thank you emails congratulating your customers on completing their buying journey. These emails are great for customer loyalty building strategy.
• etc.

How to Set Up Customer Success Emails Using PayKickstart?

PayKickstart offers a huge variety of customer success email automation options. You can set up personalized email notifications for:

• When an account is cancelled: This email notification will be sent when a user cancels their subscription
• Billing method expiration reminder: This email will be sent when a user’s card is expiring soon. This email will include an easy way to add an alternative payment method.
• Cart abandonment email: This email is sent after a customer adds something to their shopping cart and then leaves the cart without paying. The pre-built and tested cart abandonment emails are sent out after each failed attempt. Each template can be fully customized with dynamic customer and/or product information allowing you to personalize each email.
• A failed payment notification: This email is sent when a recurring payment fails. PayKickstart Subscription Saver feature lets you recover your customers’ failed subscription payments by sending three emails to the customer prior to cancel the payment:

1. Immediately after the payment fails,
2. Three days after,
3. Five days after

• A pending transaction email: This notification is triggered if the customer purchases something using a payment method that requires some time to clear
• A successful rebill notification: When a customer is charged automatically, they will get this email with payment details for their records.
• Refund notification: When a user’s payment is refunded, they will get this email notification
• Automatic payment reminder: You can set how many days prior to the automatic payment this email should be sent
• First sale email is triggered when the user makes their first successful purchase. The email offers easy access to the product purchased.
• Reminder of an upcoming charge triggered 1 day before the free trial user is charged. Obviously, this email will only be triggered if your free trial users are charged automatically
• Payment method update reminder is sent to your free trial users who haven’t yet provided any billing information for them to be charged when the trial period ends: 

PayKickstart offers a wide range of email marketing integrations that can help you create all kinds of segmentation and automation rules. These include AWeber, GetResponse and MailChimp many other email automation platforms. You can integrate any of these using your “Integrations” section inside PayKickstart dashboard:

For segmentation and personalization purposes, make sure to select ‘tags’ you want to either add or remove based on the customer actions. This will help you to automate some of your email marketing triggers going forward.

Additionally, you can set up customer surveys which will be triggered based on certain actions (a refund, sale or cancellation).

Further reading:

• 9 Tactics for Email Automation to Increase Your ROI
• How to Use Email Marketing to Grow Your Subscription Customer Base
• 4 Ways to Use Email Marketing to Engage Customers 
• 8 Dunning Email Templates for Inspiration
• How To Convert Email Subscribers Into Customers 

How to Make Customer Success Emails More Effective

Personalize, personalize, personalize

Personalization is key when it comes to a high open rate. No one likes to be addressed as a “Sir/Madam” these days, so make sure you personalize your email templates with the customer’s first name, their current plan, and any other relevant data.

To take personalization to the next level, consider using an email verifier to keep your customer data up-to-date, ensuring that your messages are not only personalized but also delivered to the right recipient.

Don’t send too many

In their annual industry survey, Adobe found that the biggest email marketing offender was the sheer amount of emails we have to deal with daily.

Set up a separate email address

No matter how great your emails are, there will be people and automatic filters that will label them to spam. This may burn your domain name, and all of your emails will be going to spam more and more.

It is wiser to develop a separate email address on a new domain for your marketing automation and newsletters. Namify can help you find a very cheap and well-branded domain name to use.

Here’s also a tutorial on how to set an email address for free. Make sure to use that email address for at least a month for internal communication to make it a bit more established. Spam filters may trap new domains and new email addresses.

Time your emails well

Sending generic emails is sometimes necessary when you need to announce a new feature but try to keep these to a bare minimum. Timing your emails well is key to your strategy success:

• Send an email after a certain action (e.g. after your customers requests a refund)
• Time your email to each user’s milestone (e.g. when your customer spends a year using your platform)
• Send emails to congratulate your customers on their birthday

Segment your users in order to time your emails even more effectively. For example, you can congratulate your customers from India on an approaching big Indian holiday.

Conclusion

Customer success emails can really boost your relationship management strategy. The main thing here: Don’t overdo! Overcoming email fatigue is hard and the last thing you want your customers to do is to start flagging your emails as spam. Time well, personalize and segment. Good luck!

Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty is the Brand Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas, as well as co-founder of Viral Content Bee. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for over a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also the frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of a weekly Twitter chat #vcbuzz

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