Overview

If you are reading this, you likely already know that Product-Led Growth (PLG) can be a highly effective growth strategy for SaaS companies. As an example, Asana uses self-serve to acquire over 50% of their customers at $400M ARR.

The PLG approach is essentially ‘try before you buy’. This strategy lets products be the driving force for converting a trial user into a paying customer. However, to be successful with PLG in practice, it requires careful consideration from the product team to balance communicating value against information overload.

With too much information at the start, users quickly become overwhelmed and leave. Too little information, there won’t understand the value of the product and will also leave. Think of this balancing act like a video game. Nobody wants to read a heavy instruction manual before playing. They just want to start playing and if it feels like it’s worth their time, they’ll continue playing.

With this in mind, one of the key challenges to PLG is communication pacing. Or in other words, finding the right touch points throughout the trial that encourage continued engagement while also communicating the value of the product.

Often this is done through messaging within the application through microcopy, banners, and callouts. However, one often overlooked communication channel is email.

As it turns out, email is incredibly important for PLG as it serves as the communication bridge from outside of your application. If a user leaves your application, no amount of messaging within your application will help them.

To be clear, we’re not talking about emails in general – and especially not mass email campaigns. The real driver in changing user behavior is through personalized transactional emails. Essentially, sending the right message to the right user at the right time.

In this older article by Patrick McKenzie (aka Patio11), he states:

"Emails Get Opened And Change Behavior. […] a little nudge in behavior could result in adding thousands of dollars of customer LTV."

These little behavior changing ‘nudges’ are the types of PLG emails we provide examples for below.

PLG email examples

1. Onboarding emails

Onboarding or ‘welcome’ emails is the low hanging fruit of PLG emails. After registration, an email can be sent with an overview of what the product is and why they may want to continue exploring.

This can be extended even further with an ‘onboarding campaign’ containing additional emails over the following days. Even better is sending a customized set of onboarding emails with content curated based on the user’s activity.

Download onboarding HTML export for free

2. Milestone emails

A milestone email is sent after a user reaches a key inflection point within the product. It’s a great way to acknowledge a key value proposition and serve as a nudge to continue adjacent exploration.

Just be careful not to go overboard with milestone emails. Nobody wants a flood of emails based on low friction clicks.

Download milestone HTML export for free

Download first watch HTML export for free

3. Metrics emails

Metrics emails show a summary of usage at the aggregate level. It can be a fun and informative way to summarize the value that they are getting as part of their journey.

Download weekly metrics HTML export for free

Download yearly report HTML export for free

4. Limit emails

Limit emails can be used to highlight trial limits and encourage upgrading.

Download credit usage HTML export for free

Download trial ending html export for free

5. Invite emails

Invite emails are a great way to get your customers to spread the word. B2B SaaS products often get more valuable as more people use them, boosting collaboration, and enabling network effects.

Download invite email template for free

How can I add emails like these to my product?

The easiest and most cost-effective way to setup these PLG emails is to use an email API. An email API will allow your team to not only programatically send emails but will also help with deliverability to ensure emails land in inboxes instead of spam folders.

We’re biased but we recommend Waypoint as an email API. We take a modern approach to sending these kind of product emails and provide an email API with tightly integrated visual template builder. This helps teams reduce developer bottlenecks and collaborate on these kind of emails.

In fact, all of the emails shown above were built using Waypoint’s template builder.

Waypoint’s dynamic template builder designed for building data-rich emails.

Learn more about the Waypoint email API.

Conclusion

Small automated email nudges can drive changes in user behavior. If you are building a self-serve motion into your product, consider using an email API like Waypoint to easily setup data-rich emails within your app and start turning trial users into customers.