Untapped Growth Levers #1: Segmented email automation can boost revenue 7%

I've been doing growth marketing for unicorns and seed stage startups and going into the world of bootstrapping was a unique experience.

With the funded startups, you have marketers to take care of everything growth.

I was surprised to find with even the most successful bootstrapped startups don't have some of the basic growth levers because they don't have dedicated marketers working for them.

I'm planning to do a series of actionable growth levers you can use for your bootstrapped SaaS. So do let me know if you find this advise useful!

Untapped Growth Levers #1
Segmented email automation can boost revenue 7%

A lot of SaaS I've signed up for don't even have a single welcome email which is its own growth lever.

But when they do have emails set up, they typically only have one for everyone.

But your users are all at different stages and this is where segmentation should come in.

What is segmentation and how do we segment users?

Not all users are created equal. I think it's best to explain segmentation by showing a sample segmentation that probably applies to most free trial/freemium SaaS.

• SEGMENT #1: Tirekickers - Sign up for a free trial but don't even come back the next day or didn't even use the product
• SEGMENT #2: Activated users - Users who've actually used the product at least once
• SEGMENT #3: On the fence users - Users who've maxed out their freemium/ free trial, and have actually been using the product a lot but haven't converted
• SEGMENT #4: Paying active users - Users who are subscribed are regularly using the product
• SEGMENT #5: Churn-risk - Users who are subscribed but haven't used the product in at least 7 days (depends on nature of your product)
• SEGMENT #6: Churned users - Users who have cancelled their subscription

How do we make use of this segmentation with our email?

First you can use your email platform to define the criteria for each segment and it will lump users into the appropriate segments.

NOTE: If you do not have an email platform like MailChimp or Customer IO and are using hard coded or transactional email providers, you need to migrate now.

Now have a think about what kind of email messages and offers are appropriate for each segment? When should you send these? Let's create some sample plans below.

Tire kickers segment - Why would someone sign up and not use the product?

Truth is there will always be a significant % of sign ups that will be tire kickers and you can't do anything about them.

But there are some that simply didn't know how to use the product or had other issues.

That second audience is who you want to target so I would make sure the welcome sequences includes a lot of educational and onboarding emails to encourage users to try the product again.

On the fence segment - They maxed out the free trial or the free features and are now getting gated. This means they liked the product but for one reason or another haven't committed to subscribing.

What should you do? Give them a discounted offer right then and there, ideally in-app but also with emails.

I worked with one startup who gave users 4 free AI articles. Once they use it up, he would send an email 30 days after they use up the free articles.

Why wait that long? They're at their warmest the moment they use up their credits.

The founder set up an email automation to send 2 hours after using the free articles as well as 2 days later, and he easily got an extra 7% in paid subscriptions thanks to that small change.

Those are just some ways you can make use of segmentation in your email campaigns. There's a lot of ways to go about it but the important thing to take away is that different users have different need states and therefore should get different emails.

If I get good feedback from this, I'll write another untapped growth lever post.

Let me know your thoughts and if you like my writing, please do consider signing up to my newsletter at aarrraudits.com where I do growth audits on random bootstrapped SaaS