How IT, SaaS, and Software Companies Can Win With Email Marketing

Some people take email marketing for granted.

It’s been around for a while and it chugs along in the background while shiny new channels or tools pop up. But for SaaS and IT companies, it’s the channel you need to move from curiosity to commitment, from trial to renewal, and from feature announcement to adoption.

Email marketing for SaaS and IT companies is a unique beast, though. Thanks to its many stakeholders and sometimes lengthy sales processes, you can’t slap an eCommerce marketing strategy on and call it a day.

This guide breaks down how email marketing will play an ever-increasing role in IT and SaaS success and what you need to do to realize its full potential.

Table of contents

• Why most IT and SaaS email strategies fall short
• What makes email marketing for SaaS and IT unique
• Must-have email campaigns for SaaS and IT companies
  • Onboarding sequences for acquisition
  • Feature adoption for activation
  • Renewal reminders for retention
  • Product updates for retention
  • Upsell offers for expansion
  • Re-engagement flows for win-back
  • Customer education for advocacy
  • Cross sell with partners
• The reason product-led growth companies need email to succeed
• The tools every IT and SaaS email marketer needs
• Email strategy tips for enterprise SaaS and IT brands
• Essential KPIs for IT and SaaS email

Why most IT and SaaS email strategies fall short

The ROI of email and its strength as a lead generation channel should grab everyone’s attention in an IT or SaaS business. For marketers, email is an opportunity to take an owned channel and make it a top revenue channel. And what leader can ignore the potential promise of ROI over $36 for every $1 spent?

While email marketing consistently outperforms other SaaS marketing channels, it’s not an automatic money tap. The SaaS and IT industries face a few unique challenges that can derail email marketing progress:

• Complex buying journeys don’t look like impulsive eCommerce sales. Unlike eCommerce, SaaS deals usually don’t hinge on flash sales or countdown timers. An enterprise purchase might involve IT leadership, end users, procurement officers, and the C-suite. That means your email campaigns have to meet each customer where they are to deliver education, reassurance, and proof.
• Long sales cycles make attribution harder. Email marketing ROI is already hard to pin down, and it becomes even harder when sales cycles drag out. Our research found that 21% of marketers don’t measure their email ROI. With dozens of touches across marketing emails, webinars, and demos, proving impact can be tough.
• Misaligned messaging. The CFO wants efficiency, IT wants integration, and end users just want software that’s not a pain to use. Too many SaaS brands fall back on one-size-fits-all, feature-heavy emails that don’t speak to anyone in particular. The result? Inboxes full of noise, not momentum.

Over-reliance on features. Product specs are important, but people connect with stories, emotions, and outcomes. Great SaaS and IT email content needs to balance features with results. Lean too far into the specs and you’ll leave people snoring. But go too abstract and corporate speak, and people might not understand what your tool even does.

What makes email marketing different in tech

We’re proponents of finding email inspiration everywhere, like in different industries and niches. Before you put strategies into practice, though, you need to understand fundamental differences between SaaS and IT email marketing versus other industries like eCommerce. Once you learn the rules, you know how to break them.

Here’s how IT and SaaS email programs stand apart from other industries:

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Essential email campaigns for IT and SaaS companies

The campaigns that win in SaaS aren’t about urgency or discounts. They’re about building trust, guiding behavior, and keeping customers engaged for the long haul.

Here are the email campaigns IT and SaaS companies commonly use.

1. Onboarding sequences for acquisition

Onboarding sequences are your first impression to establish value and trust and start building a relationship. Your goal during these email campaigns is to set users up and help them realize value right away.

Start with a clear welcome email that sets expectations, then guide them step by step through their setup and early projects. You can use inspiring customer stories or suggest ‘quick win’ tasks to help people feel like they’re making progress.

Onboarding sequence example: Bitly uses a checklist to nudge users toward their first “aha” moment without overwhelming them. They even check the first item off the list just for opening the emails.

LitTip: Use Litmus Personalize to add progress bars that illustrate how customers are completing onboarding. Or, include ‘add to calendar’ components to make sure customers remember when they’re scheduled to meet with client success managers.

2. Feature adoption nudges for activation

Your products and features are only useful if people know and use them. Timely nudges get people off the sidelines and into your product by highlighting the right feature at the right moment. If you can, trigger campaigns based on usage, like features they haven’t tried yet, instead of a set number of days between emails. You can also use dynamic content to customize messaging based on the person’s role, like setup help for admins or productivity tips for end users.

Feature adoption example: Canva lets users know they have unused credits for an AI feature, and positioning it that way makes it feel a bit like money left on the table.

LitTip: You don’t need to create complex code to deliver impressive personalized emails. Litmus’ drag-and-drop editor lets you easily add dynamic content blocks.

3. Renewal reminders for retention

You should view renewals as a decision point for customers. Starting the conversation early—30/60/90 days out—helps prevent billing surprises for customers that could turn a relationship sour. To make the most of renewal reminders, consider pairing usage stats ( like “Your team saved X hours this year”) with ROI reminders to position renewals as a chance to make more progress, not just re-sign a contract.

Renewal reminder example: Grammarly regularly sends personalized activity emails, but their renewal reminder is a bit more straightforward. They do highlight the differences between free and premium plans.

LitTip: Use Litmus Analytics to review engagement on retention emails to test and perfect these vital inflection points.

4. Product update announcements for retention

Competition between SaaS companies means customers may expect innovation (or at least improvements based on their complaints). Product announcement emails let you show off what’s new and what it means for users. Be sure to highlight outcomes they can expect or tips on how to use the new feature in their day-to-day life. Email segmentation lets you share the most relevant updates instead of flooding everyone’s inbox.

Product update example: Loom’s update announcement introduces changes and offers a few ways to learn more and start using them.

LitTip: Litmus Previews reassure you that update announcements render flawlessly across inboxes.

5. Upsell offers for expansion

Expansion is where SaaS companies turn healthy accounts into power accounts. Upsell emails should feel like added value, not a hard sell, by focusing on how premium features solve bigger problems or unlock efficiencies. Tailor offers based on current usage (like “You’ve hit your reporting limit—upgrade to Pro to unlock more insights”) and frame them as natural next steps. Using case studies or peer benchmarks can also reassure decision-makers that the investment pays off.

Upsell example: Otter.ai shares different ways to use Pro features and adds social proof through customer logos.

LitTip: Let Litmus Email Guardian keep an eye on your emails for you. Email Guardian alerts you to changes 24/7 that affect how your emails display in inboxes, so you can trust that revenue-driving emails, like upsells, send uninterrupted.

6. Re-engagement flows for win-back

Inactive users don’t always equal lost users. Re-engagement campaigns remind customers of what they’re missing and can reduce churn without heavy sales pressure. Feature product highlights, customer success stories, or incentives like bonus features or extended trials to win them back. Since these subscribers are in the habit of ignoring your emails, testing your subject lines to stand out is a must.

Example: Mailcoach reconnects with cold subscribers without feeling pushy or overly emotional. They state the facts, reiterate the value, and invite people to see what’s new.

LitTip: Let Litmus Assistant help you harness the power of AI to optimize your copy. It suggests compelling subject lines and copy alternatives in different tones.

7. Customer education series for advocacy

SaaS products evolve constantly, and education campaigns help users keep pace while reducing reliance on support teams. Creating short, topic-based “mini courses” lets customers build expertise and confidence step by step, turning them into potential brand advocates. Mix formats, like tutorials, webinars, and quick tips, to find what makes people interact with your message.

Advocacy example: Google shares new ways to use their product anchored around a milestone (back to school).

LitTip: Use Litmus Email Analytics to see which emails get the most engagement, then refine and expand.

8. Cross-sell campaigns for expansion

There’s a whole world of tools and products your customers might enjoy, and cross-sell campaigns let you introduce new options to expand accounts. Your cross-sell emails can either promote other products and brands under your parent company or send leads to partner technologies.

Done right, they can keep customers around longer, make you a valuable co-marketing partner, and turn your brand into the go-to hub for tools. The key, as usual, is to make these campaigns as helpful as they are promotional. Use usage data to personalize recommendations, show integrations in action, and share case studies.

Cross-sell example: Panda Doc introduced a Canva integration with a video explaining the connection with a CTA to upgrade.

LitTip: Use Litmus Personalize to swap in product blocks based on product usage or industry.

Product-led growth (PLG) demands email that performs

The old growth playbook of “just throw more ads at the top of the funnel” is broken. As Ramli John, author of Product-Led Onboarding, put it, “It used to be easier to raise money and say, ‘Let’s just throw more ads!’ or ‘Let’s plug retention and onboarding problems by just putting more people at the top of the funnel.’ And now that’s no longer the case.”

Instead of filling the top of the funnel or hoping that a great product alone is enough, pair PLG with email marketing. Think about it: without a sales rep guiding every step, users can easily stall. They sign up for a trial, click around, then drift away. Life gets busy, and even if they’re eager, they need reminders.

Email is the bridge that links everyone in your audience to your product. And unlike ads or in-app messaging, email reaches everyone who matters: power users, passive team members, even the exec who signs the renewal. You can guide them all with tailored, behavioral campaigns that aren’t beholden to an algorithm.

Done right, email is a growth lever for PLG companies. It accelerates activation, sustains retention, and drives upsells without a single sales call.

The tools every IT and SaaS email marketer needs

In IT and SaaS, every email you send is a chance to build trust, reduce churn, or push adoption a little further. You need a great email tech stack to get the job done, though.

Quick-reference: IT and SaaS email marketing stack

Planning and content creation

There’s a lot of ground to cover in IT and SaaS email marketing, like product launches, customer education campaigns, renewal nudges, and feature announcements. A clean planning process ensures nothing slips through the cracks.

Top tools:

• Litmus Template Library gives teams a head start with reusable, brand-consistent email layouts.
• Collaboration tools like Figma and Notion are a consolidated spot to get everyone on the same page.
• Project management apps (Trello, Asana, Airtable) keep campaigns moving—especially when multiple teams (marketing, product, success) need visibility.

AI writing tools like Jasper or Copy.ai can help you brainstorm subject lines and CTA copy so you’re not staring at a blank page.

LitTip: Always create an email brief upfront. It keeps stakeholders aligned and saves hours of revisions later.

Build, QA, and testing

Once your content is ready, it’s time to build. You need tools that make email production as easy and quick as possible without sacrificing quality.

Top tools:

• Litmus Builder cuts email development time in half with Email service provider (ESP) integrations and sync, centralized design assets, and the option to build with or without HTML.
• An email testing tool like Litmus Previews lets you test emails across 100+ clients and devices before hitting send. You’ll catch layout breaks, image issues, and font weirdness early. Email QA automation saves time without sacrificing quality.
• Litmus Proof collects feedback from your entire team in one place. Keep notes organized with handy version control.
• Litmus Email Guardian monitors your emails 24-7 and alerts you to changes in how your email renders, like if email client updates suddenly make your welcome email template break.
• Your ESP editor (like Klaviyo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or Mailchimp) may have a drag-and-drop editor in addition to HTML code views.
• Litmus Personalize makes it simple to layer in dynamic content blocks, like timers or personalized product rows—no heavy ESP configuration needed.

Tools like Grammarly help maintain tone, clarity, and polish across all of your copy.

Approvals and sending

Enterprise SaaS emails might have to pass through compliance, product, legal, and exec reviews, creating bottlenecks. A streamlined approval flow is the difference between hitting deadlines and missing product launches.

• Litmus Proof lets stakeholders approve or give their feedback directly on live email previews instead of swapping screenshots or long email threads.
• Team tools like Slack or Teams let people communicate on campaigns where they already work.

A Litmus Checklist runs automated pre-send QA: broken links, images, accessibility, tracking codes—all checked before you hit send.

Post-send review

Every send is a learning opportunity, and SaaS teams can’t stop at open rate vanity metrics.

Top tools:

• Litmus Analytics goes deeper: device breakdowns, read time, and engagement by audience segment. Better yet, it connects email performance to downstream product behaviors like trial activation or feature adoption.

• ESP dashboards (HubSpot, Marketo, etc.) surface automation and revenue flow data.
• Google Analytics 4 (or Tableau/Looker) ties email clicks to on-site behavior, trial sign-ups, and even renewal outcomes.

Email strategy for enterprise tech brands

Enterprise email teams have to juggle global audiences and teams, growing product portfolios, complex data, and potentially strict compliance requirements. You know, just simple, low-impact stuff (as if).

Since some of the stakes are higher, enterprise tech brands need to be strategic about how they approach email marketing.

1. Coordinate cross-functional workflows

The bigger the teams, the larger the potential silos. Without coordination, marketing, product, and sales could share conflicting info or outdated emails, confusing customers and eroding trust.

When everyone is pushing in different directions, it’s hard to make consolidated progress forward, too. Here’s how to fix it:

• Create a team of cross-functional leaders to meet regularly. They can get on the same page about campaigns, goals, and initiatives without dragging everyone into meetings.
• Break the “email is just marketing” mindset. Tie email campaigns to business outcomes that other teams, like sales, customer success, and product, care about.
• Centralize approvals and content in one email workflow. Tools like Litmus Proof align stakeholders, speed up feedback, and reduce bottlenecks.
• Standardize processes and templates (like modular email design systems) to reduce repetitive work and speed production.

“I think one of the problems stems from the fact that we often work in silos, depending on the size of our organization. Oftentimes, this means we’re not tying the story together. While we should evaluate the performance of individual elements, we also need a single number that reflects how all of these pieces work together.“

Dave Charest
Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact

2. Segment beyond personas

Enterprises can have a whole host of personas on their email list, and they don’t always tell the whole story. Enterprise email marketers need multi-dimensional segmentation that pulls from product, account, and behavioral data. Here’s how to get there:

• Connect your ESP or customer data platform (CDP) with CRM and product analytics so usage data drives email targeting, like admins hitting license caps or execs seeing ROI benchmarks.
• Build “composite segments” that blend attributes, like role + usage + geography, so messages feel tailored, not templated.
• Use account-based segmentation for high-value enterprise customers, aligning email to the specific buying committee.
• Create “negative segments” to suppress irrelevant sends. For example, don’t promote a feature someone already uses heavily.
• Run regular segment health checks: prune dead addresses, validate data sources, and re-score accounts as their behavior shifts.

Real team result: Alterra Mountain Company used Litmus Personalize Pro to automate their daily Snow Report emails. By segmenting based on geography and preferences, they shaved 15 hours off their workflow while delivering hyper-relevant updates at scale.

3. Balance compliance and creativity

Global enterprises operate under GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2, HIPAA—you name it. While you need to stick to these rules, nobody wants bland, legal-heavy emails (sorry, legal team). The trick is building compliance into the process without killing creativity. Here’s how enterprise teams can strike that balance:

• Develop a library of modular, pre-approved content blocks (headers, disclaimers, product boilerplates) to bake in compliance from the start.
• Make accessibility and privacy checks a normal part of your email testing checklist so compliance isn’t a last-minute scramble.
• Use Litmus Proof or similar platforms to give legal teams live previews instead of static screenshots to speed up approvals without misinterpretation.
• Build fallback content for stricter regions (EU, APAC) so localization doesn’t derail global sends.
• Keep creativity alive by focusing on storytelling and design within the safe boundaries set by compliance.

2025 State of Email stat: 14% of marketers report compliance with data privacy as a major operational challenge.

4. Elevate analytics into business intelligence

Executives don’t care about open rates—they care about revenue, retention, and renewals.

To elevate email into a boardroom-level lever, you need to connect campaign data to business outcomes. That means shifting from campaign metrics to lifecycle and financial impact. Here’s how:

• Integrate Litmus Analytics with Salesforce, Tableau, or GA4 so you can show exactly how email influences pipeline, expansion, and churn reduction.
• Create dashboards that tie campaign activity to renewal rates, upsell deals, or trial-to-paid conversions.
• Build “north star” metrics for email that map to company goals, like product adoption rate or account expansion, and then rally the team around them.
• Layer email engagement into customer health scoring so success teams can spot at-risk accounts.
• Share insights beyond marketing—product teams should know which features get the most clicks, and sales should know which nurture paths accelerate deals.
• Run A/B tests on KPIs that matter most for enterprise SaaS (like click-to-trial conversions or feature adoption) instead of stopping at email subject line testing.

Real team result: Epsilon saved over 1,000 hours each month by streamlining email creation and analytics with Litmus. Those time savings freed the team to dig deeper into performance data, using email insights to prove revenue impact and secure stronger executive buy-in.

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Measure what matters: KPIs for IT and SaaS email successes

To prove the value of email, you need to show how campaigns influence the milestones that drive growth: adoption, retention, and revenue. Traditional ESP dashboards typically don’t go much beyond opens and clicks.

Litmus Analytics goes further by helping you connect read rates, clicks, and device-level engagement to product outcomes like adoption, renewals, and expansion. Instead of asking, “Was our open rate good?” you’ll know which campaigns reduced churn or drove feature uptake.

Here are four KPIs that matter most for SaaS and the email metrics that help you measure them:

1. Activation rates

• What it means: Did onboarding emails get new users to log in, complete setup, or hit their first “aha” moment?
• Email metrics to track:
  • Click-to-open rate (CTOR) on onboarding CTAs
  • Read rate. Did people actually consume the setup instructions?
  • Downstream product log-ins from campaign links

2. Click-to-trial conversions

• What it means: How many nurture flows turn into trial sign-ups or demo requests?
• Email metrics to track:
  • Click-through rate (CTR) on CTAs like “start your trial” or “book a demo”
  • Conversion tracking via UTM-tagged links
  • Campaign-assisted conversions in analytics tools

3. Feature adoption

• What it means: Are product update emails nudging customers to use new functionality?
• Email metrics to track:
  • CTR on “Try it now” or feature-deep-dive links
  • Follow-up engagement with triggered walkthrough emails
  • In-product usage data tied to campaign opens and clicks

4. Churn reduction

• What it means: Are re-engagement campaigns reducing drop-offs and keeping renewals on track?
• Email metrics to track:
  • Re-engagement open-to-click ratio
  • CTA conversions on renewal reminders
  • Renewal/expansion revenue attributed back to campaign touchpoints

“Email is just one touchpoint in complex customer journeys, making its specific contribution difficult to isolate. For B2B or high consideration purchases, an email’s influence may not materialize for weeks or months. Traditional metrics like opens and clicks don’t directly correlate to revenue. Accurate measurement requires connecting marketing activities to pipeline and revenue by integrating marketing, sales, and financial data.“

Ling Zhang
Principal Product Marketing Manager, Oracle CX

Let’s nail your email marketing strategy from day one

Email isn’t just another box to check for IT and SaaS brands. It’s the channel that ties everything together. From that first onboarding message to the renewal reminder that keeps customers around, email is how you guide prospects, activate users, and build long-term relationships. But that only works if you have more than just a send button. You need a strategy and a toolkit designed for the complexity of SaaS.

That’s where Litmus comes in. Think of it as the cement that holds your email program together—and makes it look polished:

• Designers and developers can use Litmus Builder to create responsive, on-brand emails that look great everywhere.
• QA and ops teams rely on Litmus Previews and Email Guardian to catch mistakes and monitor deliverability before they reach the inbox.
• Marketers use Litmus Personalize to send behavior-based content that’s relevant instead of generic.
• Leaders tap into Litmus Analytics to see how email influences the metrics that really matter, like activation, retention, and expansion. They also love that Litmus connects to their ESP so work doesn’t get lost.

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