Behavior-based emails are emails that are triggered by a specific action or actions performed by your users. A lack of action could also trigger a behavior-based email.
In a nutshell, these are emails triggered by the behavior of your users (or lack of specific behavior). For example, when a user creates a task in your product, you can send them a reward email congratulating them for creating their first task.
This behavior email is sent to remind the user to create a flow. It only goes out to people that haven’t created a flow within their trial window.
Behavior-based emails are very different from time-based emails, which are sent at fixed times.
In this comprehensive and actionable guide, we are going to show you through a step-by-step process how to write, create, and implement behavior emails for your SaaS business. It is by far the most detailed and practical guide on behavior emails written for non-technical people that we’ve seen on the internet. It is based on our software for sending behavior emails Encharge, but most of the points will be applicable to other tools, as well. Enjoy!
Want to watch this guide as a video course? Check out our free academy course: Behavior-based Email Marketing for SaaS.
Contents
Why behavior emails?
Behavior-based emails are much more effective because they catch users in their tracks when they are most likely to engage with the email. Behavior emails are much more personalized and relevant than time-based emails.
- Behavior emails have a 47% higher open rate than email sequences and a 115% higher open rate than newsletters. Source: GetResponse Email Marketing Benchmarks
- A 75% higher clickthrough rate than time-based emails sequences and a 265% higher clickthrough rate than newsletters. Source: GetResponse Email Marketing Benchmarks
- Have, on average, 120% higher open rates, 110% higher click rates, and 410% higher conversion rates compared to newsletters
Are transactional emails the same as behavior-based emails? A transactional email is a system email sent by a business to a single recipient, usually after a transaction or a specific action is performed by that recipient, like a password reset or a new order. Transactional emails are required to facilitate important transactions or share critical information that the recipient requests. For that reason, businesses do not need to obtain consent to send transactional emails. A transactional email can not contain any marketing or promotional email.
Transactional emails are behavior-based emails, but not all behavior emails are transactional. For instance, when a user signs up, a welcome email can contain promotional information on why the product is worth buying. Such type of an email is considered a marketing email and not transactional.
Who are behavior-based emails for
SaaS businesses and other digital businesses that track user behavior will benefit the most from behavior-based emails.
For instance, a task-management platform will use behavior-based emails to guide users to experience value in their product by facilitating the process of creating new projects and projects.
On the other hand, simpler online businesses that do not need to track user actions might not want to take advantage of behavior emails. If you are a content creator that promotes their course within a fixed timeframe might simply want to send one-time broadcasts or a series of time-based emails before the course launch.
If you run a SaaS platform, you must implement behavior emails to improve your onboarding experience and increase the engagement of new users.
What do you need to set up behavior-based emails
This is what you need to have prepared before you start with this guide:
- Google Docs or any other text processor
- A Segment.com account OR 1-2 days of development resources — to implement event tracking and sending events to Encharge.
- Encharge account — to map and automate your behavior emails
If you are already sending events to Segment, Encharge offers a native and easy-to-use Segment integration. You can skip the development part of the process and go straight to implementing emails and flows in Encharge.
If you are starting from scratch, you would need to work with a developer to connect your app to Encharge and send events (user actions) via an API. We are going to discuss this in a later chapter, but all you need for now is to discuss the availability of your developers and secure 1-2 workdays.
Pro tip: Developers are busy people, and marketing-related development tends to be a thing that stays on the back burner. To avoid this, ensure you have thoroughly planned and organized such development well in advance, preferably a few weeks before the deadline of your project.
Create a strategy for your behavior-based email marketing
Behavior emails can help across the whole funnel and improve user engagement of the entire customer journey. However, building campaigns for every single step of the customer journey will be difficult to execute and extremely overwhelming if you are just starting out.
A more practical and efficient strategy involves focusing on a single stage of the funnel with a single goal. Whether you aim to enhance new trial user engagement or improve retention, it is advisable to select one goal with one or two key performance indicators (KPIs) to prioritize.
Here are some example goals and accompanying KPIs:
| Goal | KPI |
|---|---|
| Welcome new users | New demo calls booked |
| Educate users | Number of support tickets |
| Jumpstart early engagement | Active users in the first 7 days |
| Guide users toward Aha moments | Trial to paid conversion rate |
| Increase product usage | Number of users who activate 3+ key features |
Pro tip: Email engagement metrics such as open and click rates are important to gauge the efficiency of your emails, but they should not be the primary KPIs of your campaigns. SaaS businesses will benefit more by concentrating on product activation and revenue metrics. It is highly recommended to have a product analytics tool like Mixpanel in place to track these metrics accurately.
Example strategy
We are going to work on creating the behavior email strategy for a new SaaS called SparkApp — a task-management platform.
For the purpose of this guide, we are going to focus on improving the onboarding for new users (our goal) and discuss how to use behavior emails to increase new user activation and trial-to-paid conversion rate (our KPIs).
Action plan cheat sheet
Below is an easy step-by-step process for creating your first behavior-based email campaign. Print it out and share it with the team as you progress with this guide.
- Start with your lifecycle journey and pick one stage to focus. For example, “Onboarding”.
- Choose a goal supported by 1 or 2 KPIs. For example, onboard more customers with the KPI to increase the trial conversion rate.
- Map the customer path to success and the value moments. What are the key things a user needs to do in order to achieve the goal?
- List the events and create an event-tracking plan for your developers
- Write the copy for your behavior emails
- Create the automation flows
What are user events?
Event is the technical term for any actions your users perform on your website and inside your product.
For example:
- User Signed Up
- Task Created
- Project Updated
- Team Member Invited
- Product Viewed
- Application Installed
To keep your data clean, we suggest you stick to this naming convention for your events: Object Action.
User events are critical for the execution of behavior-based emails, as emails will be sent (or not sent) based on what events a specific user has performed. For example, when a user performs the User Signed Up event, you will send a welcome email.
Pro tip: Keep in mind that page visits and email activity actions (like email opens) could also be considered user events. However, in Encharge, these two types of actions are automatically tracked and come out of the box with our platform. They also work in a different way than other events, and you don’t have to set them up. For that reason, when we talk about events, we only refer to custom events that happen in your SaaS app, excluding page visits and email actions.
Event properties
Each event can have a set of properties. These are additional details about the event.
For example, the event “Task Created” might have the properties Task type, Time of creation, and Task priority.
The “Signed Up” event will contain properties about the user that has signed up, like email address, name, company, etc.
Each event sends values with their properties that you can later use to personalize emails and flows in Encharge.
Identify events
An identify event is a special type of event that identifies users in your app. This is usually the “User Signed Up” event. This event tells Encharge which user is performing the action (executing the event). Without it, Encharge will receive events, but they will be attached to anonymous people.
Apart from identifying users, the identify event also updates user fields directly in Encharge. For example, when the identify event is received, the name property will update the Full name field in Encharge.
It’s important to work with your developers to ensure that the identify event is set up correctly. This is explained more in our API documentation.
How to send user events to Encharge?
As we mentioned, events are user actions that happen inside your app. Every SaaS product works in a different way, so every app has different events.
In order to work with events in Encharge, your developers need to connect your app to Encharge via an API and code each custom event. However, don’t worry about this, as events are easy to code, and they don’t require a ton of development work.
Here’s an email you can send to your developers to inform them of what is required from them, so they can start researching the process of connecting your app with Encharge.
Hey John,
We are going to work with a marketing automation platform called Encharge to send our behavior-based emails. We will send out emails based on what users do (or don’t do in our app). In order for us to be able to do this, we need to connect our app with Encharge and code the events.
Below I’m sending the API documentation of Encharge.
Please take a look and start planning the implementation. I’m going to follow up soon with the specific events we need.
Thank you!
Ways of sending events to Encharge
If you look at our API documentation, you will notice that there are three ways to send data (events) to Encharge:
- Ingest API
- JavaScript tracking
- Segment.com integration
They all have their technical drawbacks and advantages, but regardless of each one your developers choose, the way you work in Encharge with events will not change for you.
To use or not to use Segment?
Segment.com is a data-piping tool that allows you to send events to different marketing and sales tools without the need to code for each tool’s API separately.
If your company is already using Segment and events are set up there, we recommend that you use Segment. This will expedite your campaign, as you don’t have to wait for developers.
If you are not using Segment yet, we recommend that you connect directly to Encharge by using our API. It’s easy to use, and it doesn’t have any additional costs.
How do user events work with Encharge?
Once Encharge starts receiving events from your product, you will be able to see them on the activity feed on the homepage of our app, as well as the activity feed of the user profiles.
To test them, you can send a test event to Encharge. All API, JavaScript, and Segment events look in the same way in the activity feed except for the icon – Segment.com has the Segment logo icon, while the rest have a generic icon.
When you click on the More button, you will unveil additional information about the event, including the event properties and their values:
Identity what events to track
Once we’ve chosen our goal and KPIs, we need to map the customer journey and the key value moments (Aha moments) of the user.
The goal in this stage of the campaign preparation is to identify the shortest path to success for the user. What are the key actions every user needs to perform in order to derive value from your app? We recommend that you start with three to five core events. Avoid trying to map every single action in your app.
For SparkApp they are:
- A user signs up for SparkApp
- Create a project
- Create at least 3 tasks
- Invite a team member
Pro tip: If you have a complex app with multiple features, run an analysis of your existing paying customers. What are the top 3 most performed actions among by your customers? These are your value moments.
Using our proper name convention for events, the 4 events we want to track become:
- User Signed Up
- Project Created
- Three Tasks Created (or “3 Tasks Created”)
- Team Member Invited
Event properties
Now is also a good time to think about what information you want to collect with each event.
For the User Signed Up event, we would want to collect all information that is recorded on the signup process, like the user’s name, email, country, and any additional information you ask for, like industry, company name, company size, etc.
The rest of the events will greatly depend on how your tool works and what information you want to collect.
Create your events in Event Management
Once you identify the events you need for your campaigns and know what information you want to track with each one, it’s time to create your tracking plan in Encharge.
Encharge has a powerful feature called Event Management. Event Management allows you to see all of the events that have been received in your Encharge account, as well as create and organize events. In technical terms, this is the “schema” of your events.
You can manually create events and define their properties so your developers understand what events need to be coded. Essentially, this will be our event tracking plan.
The goal in this step will be for us to create the events in Event Management and, when done, share them with the development team. Let’s get started.
Overview of the Event Management page
The event management page contains a list of all the events you have in your account. They are grouped into categories: Ingest API, JavaScript events, and Stripe events (you will receive Stripe billing events if you have connected your Stripe account with Encharge).
The page also shows when the event was last received, the 30-day volume, and the recent trend of events.
Creating events in Event Management
Click on the blue circle at the bottom left and create a new event.
- API Name and event name – use the event names you defined in the previous chapter. For example, “Project Created”. Keep in mind that developers might change the API name later, but all you need to know to use in your flows is the Name.
- Description – Describe when is the event triggered and why it’s important. For instance: “Triggered when a first project is created. We track this as key user activation moment.”
- Source – Depending on how your developers plan to integrate with Encharge, the source could be Site Tracking, Ingest API, or Segment. This bit is not critical now, as developers can change it later.
Single event information and properties
When you click on the event, you will be taken to the single event page, where you can find and define more information about the particular event. As you start using the event across the app, you will be able to see all flows and segments that use the event.
Here, you can create properties for the event, too. As explained earlier, properties are additional information you collect with each event. For instance, for our “Project Created” event, we might want to collect the type of the project, the timestamp when the project was created, the assignee, and other data. At this stage, properties don’t have to be precise, but it would help your developers understand your needed information.
Share your event management plan with the developers
When you are ready with creating the events, invite your developer team members to your Encharge account (if they are not there yet) and share the events with them.
Once your events start flowing into your Encharge account, you can start setting up your behavior-based emails! Moving forward, you don’t need developer help, so the ball is in your court.
Create your first behavior-based onboarding email
Onboarding emails are sent right after users sign up for your product. They get new customers familiar with the interface, key features, and the platform so they can get the most value possible out of it — especially during the trial period.
Onboarding emails help users experience an optimal customer experience, so they stick around and use your SaaS. They guide new customers on what to do first and how. They help deliver your promise.
Most of your new users will never return to your app once they visit it for the first time. Onboarding emails are the only way to get potential customers back to your site and allow them to continue experiencing your product.
Onboarding emails:
1. Help new users learn how to leverage your product.
When new users register, they have a basic understanding of your product’s overview, which is outlined on your homepage. Onboarding emails serve the purpose of highlighting specific features that are unique to your product and demonstrating the exclusive value that sets it apart from others.
2. Deliver relevant communication
Were you aware that customers who are highly engaged are six times more likely to eagerly try out a new product or service as soon as it is launched? Well, that’s hardly surprising…
Engagement occurs when you consistently communicate with your audience, particularly by sending messages tailored to their actions and behaviors. This approach ensures that your messages appear timely and relevant, leading to the establishment of loyalty and trust in your product.
3. Reduce churn
You know it’s hard to stick to a brand that offers poor support, right?
So when your users don’t get value from your product, they would tend to stop using your app altogether. This adds to your churn.
A well-designed onboarding sequence can make SaaS users enjoy your product for a long time. 88% say they’re more likely to stay loyal to a business that invests in onboarding content that welcomes and educates them.
In the next topic, we’ll explore how to write onboarding emails.
Want to watch this guide as a video course? Check out our free academy course: Behavior-based Email Marketing for SaaS.
Types of onboarding emails and when to send them
There are various onboarding emails that you can send to your users once they sign up for your tool.
Some of them include:
Welcome email
Sent as a first email to new users when they sign up.
Encharge welcome email shows the most important next action in the onboarding process and explains what results you can get with the software.
Case study email
Showcases social proof from existing customers successful with your tool.
Airtable showcases one of their case studies.
App usage email or reward email
Sent to congratulate users when they perform an important action
Ascend congratulates you on your first campaign and gives you tips on what to do with your next one.
Trial expiry warning email
Sent toward the end of the trial period
Squarespace reminds you of your trial expiration and gives you the option to extend your trial for free.
Upgrade email
Sent when a user has experienced value in your product and is ready to upgrade
Another playful email from Headspace promoting their plus plan.
Demo email
Sent to those users who booked a call or potential B2B leads. Similar to the sales-touch flow.
Calixa invites you for a product tour or a demo call.
Winback email
Also known as nudge email or reminder email. Aims to re-engage inactive users
Grammarly re-engages inactive users when they fail to.
Post-trial email
Aims to collect feedback from expired trial users
Instapage asks their expired trial users for feedback.
When to send these emails
Some of these emails are based on user behavior (events). For example, the App usage email should be sent when a user performs a specific action. In the case of our hypothetical SparkApp, we want to send an app usage email when a user performs the “Project Created” event. We would like to send an email that says, “Great job on creating your first project!” For that reason is critical that you have your app events flowing to the Encharge app, before you get started with creating your emails.
Other emails like the Case study email, can be sent at a fixed time X days after a user signups.
How many onboarding emails and when to send them will depend on your business model (free trial vs. freemium), the length of your trial, the responsiveness of your users, and other factors.
Here are the emails we plan to send for our SparkApp tool:
| Goal | When | Event needed | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Welcome email | Welcome new users and guide them towards the most important first action | When a user signs up | User Signed Up |
| Reward email | Congratulate users on creating their first project and help them become power users with the platform | When users create their first project | Project Created |
| Nudge email | Re-engage inactive users who have not created at least 3 tasks within the first 7 days of signups | 7 days after signup if Three Tasks Created is not performed | Task Created |
| Case study email | Demonstrate social proof and show how people use SparkApp | 3 days after signup | No |
| Trial expiration email | Remind users of expiring trial and give them an opportunity to expand the trial | 3 days before the trial ends | No |
| Post-trial email | Collect feedback on why people have not converted | 3 days after the trial ended | No |
This can be expanded to add more reward, nudge, and trial expiration emails but we have a solid start.
Write your first onboarding email
Writing an effective email is an art and a science. Today your users are bombarded with hundreds of emails per day, so you need to optimize your chances of getting into their inboxes.
Sending behavior emails at the right time will significantly increase the open rate of your emails, as we have already explored, but how to get users to act on your emails?
Enter the simple email formula to writing effective email copy
But why do we want to keep our emails simple?
Your users will ignore long, complex emails that get them to do many things at the same time.
- Choice overload leads to decision paralysis.
- Unnecessary information is distracting, especially when you are trying to get your users to achieve something specific.
- Emails don’t work well as resources – including tons of content and links will be useless as emails quickly get buried in the inbox and are hard to find later.
- Emails don’t work well as how-to guides.
- Apart from that, it’s hard to track the effectiveness of emails that do many things at the same time
The simple email formula is as follows:
1 Email = 1 Business Goal = 1 Desired Outcome = 1 Call to Action
The email
This is pretty straightforward. Let’s take the Welcome email, for example, as we usually tend to overwhelm the welcome emails the most.
The goal
Each email needs to serve your business in a specific way.
Is the goal of that email to move the customer down the customer journey, collect feedback, retain the customer, get the customer to refer a new user, help him recover his password or something else?
It’s critical that you identify what you want to achieve with the email, as this will guide the overall direction of that email and also allow you to track effectively its performance. Again, just one goal, not more!
The user’s desired outcome
Your users are signing up for your software because they expect it to do something for them:
- Improve the efficiency of team meetings.
- Close more client deals with awesome mood boards.
- Speed up their hiring process with better recruitment intelligence.
If your tool serves different sectors or industries, people might want to achieve different things with your tool. This is where segmentation comes into place, as we’ll discuss later.
Whatever your users’ desired outcome is, you want to focus your email on that single outcome and provide the path of least resistance for your users to achieve that outcome.
The Call to Action
Every single email needs to have just one button/link that moves the user closer to their desired outcome and closer to your goal. Not two, three, or more, just one.
Examine the nudge email below created by one of our customers Veremark. It illustrates the pain and the desired outcome of the user in a clear way, it has a clear CTA, and a clear goal.
With the knowledge of this new formula in mind, go to Encharge and create your behavior emails. We are almost close to the finish line. All we have to do is build a few flows to automate these emails.
Create your behavior-based onboarding flow in Encharge
So far, you have created your events, events are sent to your Encharge account, and you have created your emails. The last step of the campaign is to create your flows.
This is where the fun part begins!
Flows in Encharge are a visual map of automations. To create your first flow, go to the Flow Builder and select your trigger.
Encharge has a visual drag-and-drop flow builder that works with 3 types of steps:
- Triggers — starts a flow.
- Actions — used to send an email, tag a person, or execute another action.
- Filters — put people into different buckets/swimming lanes based on different conditions.
There are a ton of ways to build an email onboarding flow in Encharge. This might feel overwhelming at first, but fear not!
Here we’ll share a simple event-triggered email onboarding flow that you can use with the user events that we have defined.
Going back to the emails table from the previous step, we need to automate six emails.
Pro tip: You can create a separate flow for each email or put them all in a single flow with different triggers. The only difference is that if you use a single flow and you want to eject people from the flow (to ensure they don’t receive any more emails in the flow), they will stop receiving all six emails.
For example, if a person becomes a customer, you don’t want to send them trial expiration emails, so you need to eject them from the flow. For that reason, you should keep trial expiration emails in a separate flow to ensure that they will still receive the other emails.
Welcome email
The trigger for this event is “User Signed Up”, so all we have to do is use the Event Trigger (don’t forget the event name is case sensitive) and connect it to a Send Email action step.
That’s it, you just automated your first behavior email! Now every time someone signs up for your product, they will receive this welcome email.
Case study email
We want to send the case study email 3 days after a user has signed up, so we will use a Wait step between the welcome email and the case study email.
Reward email
The reward email has to trigger when a user performs the Project Created action in SparkApp, so we congratulate them for creating their first project. Similarly to the welcome email, we’ll use an event trigger and send email action.
Nudge email
With the nudge email, we want to remind and get back to the app people that have not created at least 3 tasks within the first 7 days of their trial.
First, we are going to use the User Signed Up trigger.
Then, we are going to use a 7-day Wait step.
We’ll connect the Wait step to a Check Field filter step and use the Event condition to check if the person has performed the event “Task Created” at least 3 times:
Lastly, the filter step is connected with a No connection to a Send Email step. If the person has not created 3 tasks or more, they will receive the nudge email.
This is how the final flow looks:
Trial expiration email
Create this and the next email in a separate flow.
Depending on which billing provider you use, you can use the Stripe Trial Ends or any of the other trial end triggers for Chargebee, Paddle, Recurly, or Chargify. This trigger allows us to automatically and dynamically send an email a certain amount of days before a trial expires.
The email will be received 3 days before the trial ends.
However, keep in mind that this trigger will fire regardless of whether the user has converted to a customer or not. For that reason, we need a filter step to ensure existing customers don’t receive the trial expiration email. We are going to check for the “Status of customer’s subscription (Stripe)” field is “Active” and connect the filter step on No. That way only non-converted users will receive the email:
This is what the final flow looks like:
Post-trial email
Lastly, we want to send an email 3 days after a trial has expired in order to collect feedback from expired trial users. We are going to use the Trial Ends trigger again, but this time, change the setting to 3 days after the trial has ended:
Pro tip: You can also send emails exactly when a trial is over but not converted using the Trial Expired Stripe step. Or even send emails to new customers with the Trial Converted step.
That’s it! You just finished creating your first behavior-based campaign. If you want to watch this guide as a video course, check out our free academy course Behavior-based Email Marketing for SaaS.
