In this blog post, I’ll try to explain what’s the plan of Mangools when it comes to an email campaign for a new product launch. Many tricks & tips are included to bring you new inspiration.

What’s the deal?

We are working hard on a new SaaS web application. LinkMiner is a backlink analysis tool that is soon going to be part of the Mangools SEO tools package.

Email campaigns will be a huge part of the launch. As a SaaS company, we have many free and paying users. This is probably the biggest factor we will consider. Thanks to another recent product launch we tested a couple of emails.

Do you have any experience?

It’s always good to have a previous experience, but where would we be without experimenting? We are, however, lucky to have dealt with the same thing this year when we introduced another tool from our SEO package.

Still, at that time we were newbies in launching a new product with an email campaign, and, moreover, we were changing our pricing model. Given the fact that there were 2 types of paid subscriptions with 2 types of billing cycles and thousands of free users in the database, we had to segment the database wisely.

Besides the mentioned segments there were beta testers, a waiting list, and affiliate partners. Altogether we had to create 8 email campaigns targeted to each group. We were communicating a new product and a change of the pricing as well. We prepared a special offer for all of our users depending on their subscription plan.

For the first-ever campaign of this type, we had a lot to manage. The biggest issue was to create the segments. Small businesses don’t have CRM so we decided to connect our database via API to Sendgrid. We’d been using it for a couple of months at that time for other email campaigns.

Have you learned something?

Always keep learning from what you do. There are things we justified, there are many we missed, and some that we won’t do in the LinkMiner email campaign. To keep it simple, here are the tips:

• Segmentation and customized offers are key to success
• Evaluate the conversion potential of each segment and invest your effort accordingly (this doesn’t mean you’ll send poor emails to the ones with the lowest potential)
• If you use services such as Sendgrid or Mailify, you can connect your database through API
• When launching a new product and changing pricing at the same time it’s good to prepare a special time-limited offer with time urgency
• Even if you think the time urgency is clear enough, recipients may miss it, so sending a reminder isn’t a bad idea but don’t panic and don’t end up using spam words or making the offer sound cheap
• Product launch is an opportunity for cross-selling and up-selling thanks to special offers
• Create one email template for the whole campaign where you can change contents based on the segmentation
• In case you run an affiliate program, create another email campaign with information for partners so they can inform their audience, use it as an additional selling point they can benefit from
• Once again, your message should be customized to its recipients as much as possible

Let’s get to work

The product is in the development. We plan to launch the beta testing in the coming weeks so the first email campaign will be targeted on registered beta testers. The optimistic plan is to release the first version of the tool before Christmas.

The subscription pricing will remain the same. This way, we will basically give an early Christmas gift to all users. Timing is another very important factor when launching a new product. Special occasions such as Christmas can initiate an idea behind the campaign.

However, if you target a specific group of people with different religions and customs, generalizing won’t help.

This email campaign will be easier compared to the previous one we did. There won’t be any time urgency. Our new product will be available for free as a part of the package for every subscribed user. That being said, there will be 5 main segments:

•     Free users
•     Paying users
•     Beta testers
•     Waiting list
•     Partners

All free users will be given an opportunity to subscribe and get premium access to the new tool as well without paying more.

Conclusion

Launching a new product and preparing an email campaign is a huge challenge. Having experience is helpful but each product is unique and so is the campaign.

Hopefully, this case study brought you some tricks & tips you will leverage during the launch of your product. Fingers crossed!

Maros Kortis is a full-time digital marketer at Mangools – Juicy SEO tools you will love. Digital marketing has been his passion for more than 4 years. Besides marketing, he’s a musician. Music is another field where he can apply his creativity.