Issue #249 All About Email

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #249 of All About Email!

🎉 Only one issue to go until the big 250!!! 🎉

Last week was my third guest author of the summer and arguably the founder of my summer series (thank you, Vicky) as we explored the “accidental oops” email.

This week is my fourth guest in our summer series, Nikki Elbaz, as we explore what SaaS and Ecommerce can learn from each other when it comes to email.

Let’s go! 👇

One of the funnest parts of hosting a podcast? Playing with popular AI music generator Suno to make the background music.

🎶 (My husband thinks the track I landed on sounds like The Little Mermaid’s “Under the Sea.” Please tell me you don’t agree.) 

But it’s not all fun and games, so when I finished exporting my files – commercial rights in hand – I switched back to the free plan. 

🚨 And Step 2 of their downgrade flow totally surprised me: 

👀 You’re seeing it right. 

They offered to pause my subscription. Not cancel. Pause.

🤔 In SaaS. How often do you see that?

If you've ever subscribed to Dollar Shave Club or Butcher Box, or any of the million ecomm subscription boxes out there, that pause button is as familiar as their monthly delivery emails.

🚨 In ecomm, "not now" doesn’t have to mean "goodbye forever”, and according to research from Eightx, that pause button helps them retain 9-22% of churning subscribers. 

Yet SaaS has no such lever. 

💡 SaaS can copy some great moves from the ecomm playbook, and ecomm can do the same from the SaaS playbook.

The industries share so many similarities (to name a few):

…that the two are uniquely able to swipe successful strategies from each other. 

Here’s a sampling: 

🚨 SaaS is obsessed with the “aha” moment, the moment a new user hits the point where the product feels necessary.

Obviously, Trial Starts are measured, but they don’t hold a candle to the attention that “Time to Value” is given. 

🎉 Ecomm, though, celebrates the first purchase. 

Yet, the real value isn’t checkout; neither for the brand, nor the customer. Rather, it’s when the product delivers… um, value. When the serum brightens her skin, when the knife cuts his prep time.

That’s not at purchase, and it’s not even at delivery. 

💡 Sell the win they already paid for before you sell the repeat purchase.

Initial emails should drive toward that value discovery; send tutorials, case studies, and check-ins before you jump to the "20% off your next order."

✅ Focus your emails on driving that value, and reap the LTV. 

🧠 Because the only way to drive towards value is to pay attention to where your user is sitting, SaaS lives on behavioural triggers: emails that fire based on what a subscriber actually did, not just because the content calendar lists a send.

Ecomm has all the user behaviour it needs to do the same, and mostly ignores it for blast campaigns. 

💡 The most-left-on-the-table flow? Replenishment.

If someone buys a 30-day supply, you know roughly when they'll run out. Trigger a reminder at Day 23  (you can be fancy and call it order gap analysis), and you land in the inbox at the exact moment of need.

🚨 The ROI is almost unfair: replenishment reminders convert at 8-15% (Ometria), versus 1-3% for a general promo send (HelloRetail).

Sure, some shops run them like clockwork, but not as many as you’d expect with numbers that good. 

Whenever I suggest an abandoned cart flow to a SaaS, the response I get is something like: “Abandoned cart? Those are for ecomm! We can’t track intent the way they can.”

🤔 Mmmhmm. You're tracking MQLs and SQLs. You know who hit the pricing page, who started a trial and stalled, who opened the plan comparison three times. You have all the intent data for a gorgeous abandonment flow. 

💡 What SaaS is actually missing is ecomm's nerve.

When a shopper abandons cart, ecomm knows they were this close, so the emails sell: they surface objections, play up the motivation, drop a coupon. Whatever it takes to drive the purchase. 

When a SaaS lead stalls? The brand tucks them into a gentle 90-day nurture that delivers content piece after content piece, and never actually makes the ask. 

Nurtures have their place, sure. But a high-intent lead who just bounced off your pricing page doesn't need to “warm up.”

💡 They need you to answer the objections, make them look good for putting you on the shortlist, and for you to ask for the close.

🧠 Nobody's watching for expansion opportunities, the SaaS equivalent of a repeat purchase:

I built a whole framework around those moments (I call them Change Flags), but you don't need a 9-part framework to start.

You just need to broaden the goal of lifecycle to include more than initial onboarding. 

🚨 Every artist knows that the best inspiration is found outside their studio.

💡 Steal shamelessly from cross-industry emails. Your CTR will thank you for it.

Simon, thanks for having me (and for the excuse to nerd out over email).

Nikki

❤️ Before we go any further, I am a massive Disney fan and fondly remember (yes, I’m old) going to see the original “The Little Mermaid” in my local cinema, and “Under the Sea” is one of my favourite Disney songs.

Jodi Benson 👑

Anyway, back to Nikki, and thank you again for being a guest author!

Here are three of Nikki’s standout points for me:

1) 🚨 The pause option is such a simple idea, yet it makes complete sense. Someone needing to stop paying right now doesn’t necessarily mean they’re finished with the brand forever. E-commerce understands that much better than SaaS seems to.

2) 💡 I also really like the point about “time to value”.

We treat the purchase as the win, when the real win is the customer actually getting the result they paid for. That means the first emails should be about tutorials, case studies and check-ins, not a 20% off code before they've even used the thing.

3) 🧠 "Stop nurturing leads." There's a real difference between warming someone up and being too polite to ask for the sale. A stalled trial user who's hit your pricing page three times isn't cold; they're sitting right there.

- - - - - - - - -

🤔 So if you work in e-commerce or SaaS and next time you're building a flow, ask which industry would handle this moment better, yours or the one next door.

See you next week, {{first_name|friend}}, for Issue 250! 🤯 🎉

Simon

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

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This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋