A Playbook For SaaS Companies

First, create a new CTA Funnel in RightMessage.

Now, we're going to first create the shell: what are the different stages for a customer?

For a software company, it's probably something like:

• Anonymous visitors (not on your list)
• Subscribers (on your list, but don't have an account)
• Trials (people who are currently going through your free trial)
• Monthly customers (people paying you monthly – could also be those on your lower end plan)
• Annual customers (people paying you yearly – many SaaS companies want to make more $$$ upfront by selling customers on annual plans)
• Churned customers (started a trial or had an account and then canceled)

Here's how I've mapped that out in a RightMessage CTA Funnel:

(All the data about who's a customer, what type of customer they are, etc. should be kept in your email marketing database. This way, we can pull that data directly from your email marketing backend!)

Pretty nice, right? If you do a lot with visual automations in your email marketing tool of choice, you should feel right at home.

Now we're going to fill in the blanks, and pitch a specific offer to each visitor:

This is a pretty straightforward, linear funnel. I haven't added any surveying or whatnot, but you could (and probably should) collect that data.

For example, at RightMessage (a SaaS 👋) we want to know...

1. What email marketing software you use.
2. The tool you're currently using to build your list.

This way, if someone uses ConvertKit and is currently using Sumo, we can pitch a subscriber who hasn't started an account with something like "Want to grow your ConvertKit list faster than you could with Sumo? Start a free trial..."

Each offer you setup is going to contain some content (a headline and description) along with an action, like collecting emails (for anonymous visitors) or having people click through to a particular URL.

Simply go through and ask yourself: "If someone is new to my site / on my list, but hasn't started a trial / is a customer / has canceled... what's the ideal thing I'd like them to do next?"

Well, you already know what that is – right? 😀

• New here? I know there's a lot of friction in plugging in your credit card details and starting a trial... why not join our free email course?
• Been getting a ton of value from our emails? Let's put theory into action and start a trial.
• Are you a customer? Save a bit of money (and let us recoup our acquisition costs!) by paying us annually.
  
• Have you canceled? Check out all these awesome things that we've added since you left...
  

Once you've setup this CTA Funnel, all you need to do is to keep creating great content and driving your list back to your site – and we'll do the rest.

"Perfect!"

You've just put the finishing touches on your latest blog post, and it's time to email it to your entire list – customers, non-customers, canceled customers, and everything and everyone in between.

But before you do that, let's make sure you're pitching them on the right stuff.

We recommend that, at a minimum, you expose this offer funnel to your blog. Let's add a toaster popup that shows up after you've read more than 50% of a blog post, along with an inline CTA that'll appear at the end of every blog post.

Now that your funnel is created, it's time to add your first widget. Let's start with a toaster:

Select "Toaster" and then call it "Blog Toaster":

Ensure that you only show it on blog/* (assuming that's how you structure your blog) – this way, it'll only show up on your blog.

Save this, and create a new "Inline" widget:

We give you a snippet of HTML code that you'll want to include in your site's template wherever you'd like this widget to appear.

Now, once you click "Publish to site", visitors on your blog will automatically see both a popup toaster and a post-article inline CTA that mirrors exactly what they should be doing next.

And because we know when returning subscribers and customers come back, we'll take care of figuring out what data you have on them so that we can always pitch them on exactly the right offer.

From here, you could add other CTA widgets, like maybe a sticky bar that's displayed across your entire site – your blog and the other key pages on your website.

If you're a SaaS and you send your customers and non-customers alike back to your website, we highly recommend you implement this recipe. After all, you don't want to be showing your gorgeous email newsletter opt-in form... to customers with a cLTV in the thousands 😀