The Ultimate Guide to PLG Communication That Converts

Thank you for your interest in the Ultimate Guide to PLG Communication That Converts ebook.

You’ll see that emails are a recurring theme in this guide. That’s because the backbone of great product-led growth is almost always great email.

Guiding people through onboarding, adoption, and expansion.

Bringing them back into the product.

Recaps to highlight the success and value experienced from the product.

Emails are a great way to drive product-led growth across customer life stages. 

In this ebook, you’ll learn how effective personalization is in driving product-led growth. We’ll show you a lot of examples of how top PLG businesses are using emails with tips to tailor messaging to your users and customers at scale.

Happy reading!

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Personalization and Product-Led Growth

It’s the difference between ‘Buy these shoes’ and ‘These shoes were made for you’.

In a world where everyone is bombarded with a constant stream of messages, alerts, and push notifications, personalization helps you stand out and make a real connection with your audience. 

Personalization is the key to unlocking product-led growth because it allows you to tailor your product to the unique needs and preferences of your customers. It shows your customers that you understand them and care about their needs.

But personalization isn't just about making your customers feel special. It's also about making your product more effective. Multiple studies over the years have shown that personalization means loyalty and better ROI.

Tailoring your communications to seem like a 1:1 conversation also means that you are optimizing it for your target audience, which will lead to more engagement, better retention, and ultimately more revenue.

Why Emails in PLG?

The product is the primary channel for growth in PLG - the very definition of the concept. That doesn’t mean we don’t use other channels at all. 

Sometimes it is necessary to employ channels other than the product itself to invite back the disengaged, distracted, and churned users. You will also have other profiles of customers, for example, admins like Project Managers and buyers like a CPO, VP of Success, etc. who do not spend much time actually using the product. But, it is necessary to persuade them to grow revenue. 

Net, net, in PLG businesses, channels other than the product also help accelerate growth. And, email is one of the best marketing channels for product-led B2B SaaS businesses because it

1. Has a high return on investment (ROI) - $36 for every $1 spent (Source: Litmus)
2. Allows communication at scale required for an explosive top-of-the-funnel of PLG businesses and
3. Delivers personalization at scale.

Emails complement your PLG strategy at every stage of your customer journey.

We covered the motive and the means, let’s look at some practical examples from top PLG companies at various customer lifecycle stages. 

Onboarding Emails

User onboarding matters.

Onboarding sets the stage for the overall product experience. You may not get another chance to showcase your product’s value to the user. A formidable first impression also means the user trusts your product a bit more. 

Studies show that a positive onboarding experience means users show a higher willingness to pay ranging between 12% - 21% whereas a negative experience drops it as low as 3%. 

And, value-based onboarding experience can drive the willingness to pay as high as 27%.

The positive experience trickles down to better product engagement, retention, higher customer lifetime value (LTV), positive product feedback, and overall business growth.

On the other hand, a poor onboarding experience makes it much more difficult to re-engage the customer. This often leads to negative word of mouth about the product. The poor experience can easily snowball into disengagement, churn, and retractive feedback.

Why Onboarding Emails?

You are sold on the importance of a good onboarding strategy. 

So, you and your team designed the world’s most intuitive and frictionless onboarding process known to humans. There is a chance that you are still seeing a good percentage of your users abandon your product during onboarding.

In an ideal world, the best product and user onboarding experience should be enough to get you the sign-ups and conversions you dreamed of.  

But in the real world, you still need a friendly reminder to get the users back on track. Yes, I am talking about onboarding emails. 

Wes Bush’s bowling alley framework describes onboarding emails as conversational bumpers in a product-led growth strategy that help bring back sidetracked users back to the straight path to the desired outcome. So true!

Just like the onboarding experience differs from product to product, there can be a variety of onboarding emails. Depending on where the user is in the onboarding process, length of the trial period, and usage limitations in the freemium model, you can craft them to complement the onboarding experience. 

Popular Onboarding Emails

Let’s look at some of the most common and effective onboarding emails.

Welcome Email

A welcome email is the first communication you send after a user signs up. And yes, they should be MANDATORY.

Why?

Because

• Who doesn’t like a warm welcome?
• Welcome emails get the highest open rates. That gives you the best opportunity to drive activation.
• You can start building a human connection with a new user.

The goal of a welcome email can differ. Here are some examples.

Heap takes their new users straight into the product with a clear first goal set.

Speaking of clarity, Slack does an amazing job of informing the new user why they got the email in the subject line and encourages setting up the new workspace in easy steps.

Helpful Resources

Even though many welcome emails come with How to start with [product] steps, emails with detailed and relevant resources usually follow a welcome email.

Be it usage tips, starting up guides, redirecting to in-app support, or sharing a help document, these emails play a valuable role in moving your new users to the next step on their golden path.

You may have a generic beginner’s guide but curating the resources has to be done with the common friction points in mind. Talk to your early adopters to gather a list of FAQs you can answer easily with this email or a series of emails with useful tips.

The goals of a resource email can also vary. Educating the user, logging in and trying out a basic feature, uploading real data, setting up a meeting with the CS manager, and so on. It entirely depends on the product, its learning curve, trial length, and the business goals.

For example, Notion sends emails with how-to videos to help users get familiar with the product for different use cases. These help new users adopt the product quickly. Some of the best practices also include encouraging users to try more than basic features like Fastly and consider adding a human touch to the learning experience.

Reminders

Reminder emails can be about the expiring trial, finishing the first task using your product, or re-engaging after a period of inactivity during the trial. The number  of reminders and the content of the email are decided based on the length of the trial period, PLG strategy, product activity, and so on.

Here’s how some of the top PLG companies are setting up conversational bumpers for their users with reminder emails.

Buffer reminds new users to connect their social media handles to their product. Duolingo sends a get back on track email to re-engage users. Smartsheet does more than sending a trial expiration warning. They create FOMO by explaining the privileges lost due to a downgrade.

What Makes A Good PLG Onboarding Email?

The above emails are some examples of good product-led onboarding email campaigns. Some best practices you can get inspired from these emails are

1. A clear subject line.
2. One goal for each email.
3. A human From address.
4. Relevance to the user’s progress in the product.
5. First milestone or a quick win celebration. 

Apart from analyzing, optimizing, and experimenting, product-led companies should include onboarding emails in the feedback loop to perfect the entire onboarding experience. 

What Makes A Good Great PLG Onboarding Email?

Are all onboarding emails impactful? 

As mentioned in the previous sections, the content, type, and frequency of onboarding emails have to be relevant to your product and business goals. You need to align your team and the stakeholders about the outcomes of each email and the whole campaign before even designing the email sequence. 

Here is the number one tip you need to design a kick-ass onboarding email campaign that gets results.

Ready for it?

Personalization! 

The top factor that distinguishes a great onboarding email from others irrespective of all the aforementioned conditions is and always has been personalization. Even in the inbound and outbound eras, personalization played an important role in deciding which companies emerged as clear winners.

In PLG companies personalization is multi-faceted. There’s personalization based on CRM data like web activity, social interactions, sales touch points, etc. and there is personalization based on product activity events. A mix of these two is more relevant to the customer in the end-user era. 

Loom is a great case study of personalized PLG onboarding emails. Take a look for yourself.

Loom personalizes the first email users receive based on the option to join an existing workspace, create a new workspace, or use the product for a personal project. The personal project users do not receive the first email shown below. 

The next onboarding emails share tips on how to record your first video, celebrate the first milestone and nudge the user to share it with the world, and show insights about the views in the next email. The user’s product activity triggers the relevant emails.

Loom personalizes the subject line too based on what the user signed up for. 

As the users get close to the trial end date, Loom sends timely reminders with an easy link to add the payment details. Converted users go on a different track from here. 

Even if the user doesn’t end up purchasing the paid plan, Loom checks with the users with an offer of additional storage for getting more teammates onboard. A chance for Loom to expand their user base and establish relationships for team and enterprise deals. 

Each email is tailored to talk to the user 1:1 with the product and firmographic data. Amazing, right?

The Secret To Making World-Class Product-Led Growth (PLG) Onboarding Emails

No matter how elaborate or simple your product onboarding is designed to be, personalization is the (not so) secret sauce that enables you to talk directly to your users about their specific needs. 

Personalized PLG onboarding emails that really speak to the customer or user and get them back on track to complete the onboarding process, initiate product engagement, and hit a home run with a conversion. 

Milestone Emails

Product-led growth companies (and their investors) rely on Net Revenue Retention (NRR) as the key metric to understand and gauge the overall health and sustainable growth of their businesses. We calculate NRR using this formula

It is pretty evident that account expansion, churn and contractions play a pivotal role in determining the success of the PLG business. Focusing on a user retention strategy that helps in all three areas is a good idea to improve NRR. 

If you are wondering what retention strategy addresses the problems with scaling up accounts, churn, and downgrades, you need to know more about PLG milestone emails.

What are Milestone Emails?

Milestone emails are triggered when the users cross or need a nudge to reach an important inflection point in product usage. 

Sending milestone emails is important because they

• Deliver positive reinforcement to new users to encourage returning to the product
• Create sticky users with a nudge when they are stuck clueless or inactive 
• Remind users of the product’s value and impact 
• Build product champions and earn loyalty

Milestone emails help reduce activity churn with timely intervention. 

Let’s take a look at some examples of PLG milestone messages that can be sent at different stages of the customer journey.

Complementing Onboarding

When a new user signs up to try out a product, they need to stick around long enough to experience its value. We need to keep the time to value (TTV) short to retain the user’s interest. A personalized onboarding experience is the first step toward user retention in a product-led growth business. 

Completing the onboarding process is an important milestone for a newbie user. Make sure you celebrate the user’s baby steps with them while guiding them to the next course of action.

Polly does exactly that. They send a milestone email celebrating the first poll sent and encourage users to complete onboarding and lists out tips on how to send the next one.

Celebrate Quick Wins

Clicking the send button on a campaign can be nerve-racking. We, at Inflection, love celebrating that bravery! This is the email we send to celebrate our customers’ first campaign launch.

The goal of this email is primarily to encourage product usage and give them confidence about being on the right path. These emails can continue to be triggered at different milestones along the user’s product journey.

The first aha! Moments are different for each product but the joy of making it to the first milestone is commonly experienced. This moment can influence the decision to convert to a paid user early on, in a big way.

The celebrations need not stop with the first win. Continue showing appreciation by sending them a high-five at every milestone along the way. 

Canva uses badges to show their continued appreciation to the users at each milestone. 

These look great for bragging on social media, BTW. The user gets bragging rights, and Canva gets their loyalty and word-of-mouth marketing. Win, win!

Value, Appreciate, and Show Them What’s Next

The celebration email is a great way to get your customer’s attention. Use it to deploy them on their next mission.

We talked about Canva’s badges already. They send these amazing badges in email with a gentle push to take the next steps. 

Be extra helpful about the next action item, especially if your product has a steeper learning curve. Segment is another example. They relay the successful connection message and clearly lay out the next step with their product. 

Product adoption doesn’t stop with the first few milestones. Keep delivering a delightful and positive experience while nudging them towards adoration. 

Gamify The journey

Along their way to conversion to a paid customer, users need a delightful experience to stick to the product. Grammarly is one of the best case studies of gamified product usage. Right from the sign-up, they send encouraging messages, show the progress of writing using Grammarly, and unlock features as the user progresses. A series of milestone emails personalized to the user’s writing activity and goals.

The goal here is to create sticky users and keep them on the path to conversion with a lot of cheering.

Do what Grammarly does to keep your customers coming back for more.

Encourage Expansion

Scaling up existing accounts can be easier than acquiring new customers. Milestone emails can support campaigning to up-sell or cross-sell to your customers. 

Check out this flattering and personalized email from Mural.

They acknowledge the user’s achievements before encouraging them to invite more team members. And, they state a reason why. Products that deliver more value with a network effect (more users or orgs connected, more value. For example, Slack) can steal this idea right off Mural’s playbook.

Tips To Craft Impactful Milestone Emails 

Do all milestones get conversions or other expected results?

Not quite.

The products are different or the product-led growth models vary. The PLG milestone emails have to be relevant to your PLG strategy, your business goals, and the product’s learning curve.

Here are some of the best practices to get the milestone emails right

1. Personalization

The first and foremost factor that decides the success of any campaign is personalization. 

In a product-led environment personalization not only means the customer’s firmographic data but also their product behavior. 

Sending an email to invite more team members to an individual using your product for a personal project. PLG companies need to understand the user and their goals to get the personalization formula right. 

Segment your users based on their product activity. For example, their familiarity with your product — newbie, intermediate, power user, etc., along with CRM data like clicking on the help button, attempting to access a gated feature, etc. For any milestone email to be impactful, you need to use a wholesome mix of product and CRM data. 

2. In sync with product milestones

Milestone emails show how much you appreciate your user’s association with your product and business. However, if you are limiting them to anniversaries, they are not motivating enough for the user to return to your product.

Figure out the important product milestones your power users and best customers journeyed through to get to where they are. These are your ideal trigger criteria for milestone emails. Analyze and optimize these triggers to deliver a personalized message with the right context. 

Aligning the milestone messages with notable product events gives you the best leverage to activate disengaged users, hand-hold users at the sticky parts of the product, and ultimately prevent churn.

3. Actionability

Valuing and appreciating your customers is a great way to earn their loyalty. Your milestone messages are not very useful if they don’t nudge the customers to take action. 

You need to give them reasons and motivation to keep going back to the product to actually experience its impact in solving their problems. Show them what’s next and exciting in the product, how far they’ve come, and how little it takes to get to level up. Don't forget to reward positive action.

Personalized Milestone Emails - A Winning Retention Strategy

Acquiring new customers is exciting. New customers mean new revenue, and who doesn't love that?  But, it’s not the only way to grow and succeed though.

Retention has a huge impact on your revenue, especially in a downturn. It has always been a hot topic in the product-led growth community for obvious reasons. Retaining customers has a lot to do with mitigating churn. And, the best way to mitigate churn is to see it a mile away and avoid it.

Personalized and product-led milestone emails delivered at the right time are one of the best ways to mitigate activity churn. Show them appreciation, give them reasons to stick with your product, help them at tricky turns, and celebrate their wins. You can earn their loyalty on top of slaying churn. 

Recap Emails

Spotify has done it again. We had our year wrapped in December and loved it.

Spotify Wrapped is an iconic recap that gives us the chance to look back and reflect on something we’ve done all year - listen to music (and podcasts). It tells us a little bit about ourselves, and how things changed or did not change. 

The popularity of similar recap emails like Peloton’s month in review and Uber’s In the rear-view in B2C inspired B2B marketers to put their own spin on it. 

Recap Emails In B2B

Why are the recap emails so popular on both sides of the aisle?

For users, a good recap helps them reminisce and re-evaluate something that took place over time. Users stick to, modify, and re-think decisions easily when relevant information is available at a glance.

The benefits extend to businesses and product makers too. 

Recap emails can be the ultimate tool to drive product engagement for a product-led growth (PLG) company. Reminding users of the value they are getting with the product is another touchpoint to improve retention and reduce churn. 

In ENT-led SaaS companies, most companies do a quarterly business review, having a CSM bring forth data and insights about their usage and presenting them to the customer. It’s highly effective, but this heavy-handed approach is not feasible for most PLG companies due to the massive customer counts. Recap emails can be like “automated QBRs” as one Inflection customer put it.

There is more than one way to create a good user-centric PLG recap email that accelerates product-led GTM motion.

Time-In-Review

We’ve seen some amazing year-in-review emails over the years. Much like in B2C, these emails tend to recap the whole year, quarter, or month. The frequency depends on the type of business, product, and user. For example, an online user community might send a week-in-review email whereas a SaaS business might stick to a year-end round-up.

These emails can be an exciting round-up of how the customer’s product journey highlights from the past year, and more. Canva’s year-in-review email is a great example. 

The round-up emails usually come with a share or invite option. Canva’s CTA in this email takes back the user to Canva and gives an option and steps to share their design personality with the online world. 

These emails are not only great for generating buzz and going viral on social media; they are also great for building customer relationships, branding, and driving product engagement. Airtable posted an amazing recap of their year via their customers’ success stories in a video. 

Announcement Recaps

One of the best ways to catch up with your customers, leads, and even lost opportunities with what your product has been up to is by announcement recap emails. Pack up all your org and product announcements into a nice little package to pique the audience’s interest.

Census rounds up their product highlights, business news, introduces their user community, and much more in a fun package. 

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The PLG recap emails need not be boring headlines. Announcement recaps can act as social testimony too. You can add new customers you acquired in the past year to build trust and appeal to leads on the fence. 

You can use these emails to drive demo requests to the brand-new gated features or products. Pre-launch teaser announcement about a premium feature is bound to keep your audience hooked. 

Product Value Recaps

Product value recaps are the most valuable emails a PLG company can send to their customers. A clear and digestible view of how your product helps the customer solve their problems is valuable for the customer as well as your business. 

Grammarly insights emails every week is a prime example. Consistent, shows progress towards product usage milestones, helps in improving writing, and pitches the paid version with benefits. I can’t think of a better value-packed email. 

These emails can create sticky users, re-engage inactive users, and support the CS team to upsell and cross-sell.

The frequency and the insights shared can vary depending on the PLG strategy (freemium, free trial, open-source) product, type of account (individual, team, enterprise), and also user role (team member, admin). 

Adding more value to a PLG Recap email

Factors like consistency and readability are definitely important when figuring out the hows, whats, and whens of your next big PLG recap email campaign. But, there are 3 fundamental building blocks to any PLG recap email that decide the business value driven by them.

1. Personalization

 The popularity of recap emails got everyone doing a variant of Spotify Wrapped. Which is a great idea in theory. But, to cut through hundreds of such emails, you need to deliver value that appeals to your users. Personalization is the way to win. 

Make the information delivered in a PLG recap email relevant to your customers. Personalize the insights, announcements, and round-ups based on the user’s activity in the product and their role. For example, sending the same insights to an individual contributor using your product for a personal project and an admin user who primarily coordinates cross-functional work between two teams is not impactful for one or both types of users. 

Stack Moxie uses Inflection to deliver a personalized email digest of value metrics to their users based on a powerful combination of the users’ product activity and CRM data.

2. Action Required

Personalizing PLG recap email definitely helps in adding valuable and relevant information for the customer for sure, but the campaign’s success depends on instigating action. 

A summary of announcements, product news, and usage reports can easily become a boring newsletter-esque email that just delivers information to the customers. Use your recap emails wisely. Trigger an action from the user in the right direction. 

Give your users a reason to get back into the product. Zapier is a great example of using curiosity to drive more product usage from weekly reports.

PLG recap emails are also a great way to bring back disengaged users and reactivate their product journey. Show how much the users are missing out, a.k.a create FOMO and nudge re-activation. 

3. Feedback loop

When you first create a PLG recap email, you might start off with a summary of product value metrics that are useful to any user. But be sure to deploy a feedback loop to understand how your customers’ perceived value is from your product. Customize and modify the visual insights your customers see based on the feedback. 

This can help you understand the user’s perceived value. So, you can take the necessary steps to address the value gap (between perceived and experienced product value).

Recapping Why We Need PLG Recap Emails

When you are setting up the stage to enable a product to sell itself, you need a timely reminder that visualizes the value experienced by the customers. And, PLG recap emails are the perfect tool to display the value in an attractive package. 

Recap emails in a product-led growth business can serve different purposes including but not limited to accelerating product adoption, driving product engagement, and supporting customer success. A clear goal-oriented personalized value delivery consistently determines the success of a PLG recap campaign.

Reactivation Emails

Reducing churn is crucial for a product-led growth (PLG) business to achieve sustainable growth. But, customer churn is inevitable despite your best efforts. There could be many reasons for it ranging from bad product experience to change in requirement. 

In this section, we are going to talk about how to win back or reactivate lost customers.

Winning back lost customers is worth the effort because studies show that reactivations can bring back at least 20% of your churned customers. This has a massive impact on your customer Life Time Value (LTV). 

But, are all lost customers worth winning back?

Reactivating the Right Customers

Product-led growth companies see a higher volume of sign-ups compared to the traditional B2B SaaS because of the low barrier to the product. Some of those users might find that your product is not the right fit for their requirements. Or, these users or prospects might be in the market for something you are not offering currently. 

Trying to reactivate ill-fit customers is a lost cause. At best, your attempts to reach out will annoy the already frustrated customer. If you know your product is not the right fit for a user’s needs it is best to let them go than to obsess over reactivating them. 

With the misfit users gone, you have the advantage of a healthy user community too.

Learn from The Churned

Understanding the reason for churn is crucial before launching a reactivation campaign. This is the very necessary warm-up before the marathon. 

Pinning down the reasons for churn has another advantage. Think of them as the amber flags of product activity churn. You can identify the friction points in the product experience and make amends to prevent and reduce churn before it is too late. Prevention is always better than cure. 

Conducting off-boarding interviews or micro surveys during customer exit can help you figure out the reason behind the cancellation.

Gathering product feedback is etched into the growth DNA of PLG companies. And, who better to tell you what is not working than a user ready to ditch your product?

Effective reactivation campaigns start by asking for feedback on what went wrong. This helps segment churned customers and build a PLG email audience based on the reasons. 

A simple survey or a plain email with a human touch can get you the answers you need. 

Off-boarding offers

Once you’ve figured out the reason behind losing a customer, it's time to think about wooing them. 

In a highly competitive B2B SaaS environment one of the major reasons for churn can be the cost. Off-boarding emails need not be about a price point but also value-focused. In a PLG business, leverage your product’s winning USPs to convince the user that you are offering them a better deal in terms of value. 

Including an offer they can’t refuse in your seemingly last email to a leaving customer can help you salvage the deal. Incentivize immediate action while still showing the product value clearly. 

LinkedIn nudges their premium subscribers to make the best out of the premium features and follows up with a discount offer. The reactivation email also answers any questions about the value of renewing the premium subscription.  

You can even offer a free assessment and a 1-1 demo with your customer success manager to demonstrate some of the advanced features that show the product value.

What’s New Emails

A growth strategy in every PLG company includes sending product update emails to all existing customers. A reactivation strategy needs to include the same for the lost customer database. These emails are a great opportunity to reinvigorate a lost customer due to reasons related to the product features and experience. 

Bundle up all the new product updates, improvements, integrations, and relevant business announcements into a short video or target this segment of churned users with specific updates. Create FOMO and show an easy path to reactivate the accounts. Let the users try out the new and improved product for themselves. 

Offering limited-time access to gated updated features can also help trigger immediate action from the former customer. 

The Best Reactivation Emails

Reactivating a lost customer is definitely harder than converting a trial user. Because, they already checked out the product and were unimpressed with the experience or worse, frustrated. Convincing such customers for a second chance needs the right strategy and incentive. 

The key lies in personalizing the reactivation campaign for the PLG customer.

Gathering intel from an off-boarding survey can definitely help in segmenting lost customers. It tells you what exactly they were looking to achieve with your product. Use your cancellation confirmation email as the first touch point to win back a lost customer. Include a survey or invite them to a 1-1 exit interview to dig deep into the reason for churn. You might even end up reactivating the customer right away. 

Not all customers might take an exit survey. If you do not have the exact reason for churn, look into the former customer’s product activity for clues. Traceback steps and figure out the friction points along their product journey that led them to the exit gate. 

If this sounds too complicated to scale for a PLG company with a huge user database, you should check out Inflection.  

You can add many dimensions to your automated product-led reactivation campaigns to make them truly personalized for every lost customer. Use a combination of the off-boarding survey response, the former user’s product behavior, and firmographic factors like org size to orchestrate the right PLG reactivation email campaign. 

Send targeted emails with product experience improvements to the list of lost customers who gave feedback about friction in the product or user experience. Show them proof of improvement to win back their trust. Offer a limited-time trial to reactivate their account and encourage trying out the new and improved features. 

Here are a couple of examples. Avocado and Asana clearly state their product improvements. Avocado goes a bit further to persuade the users with a discount. 

You can go two ways from here. Offer further help to get the best out of their reactivation or sweeten the pot further with a discount or free add-ons. Personalizing the reactivation offers can help you entice a lost customer.

For example, a user churned during the onboarding process can be offered an extended trial pick up where they left off. Remind them of the product value at the end of a personalized onboarding process without having to go through a paywall. 

The same wouldn’t convince a former customer to use your product for a team project. Announcing changes in your pricing tiers, the updated cost per seat in a team plan, and newly added features are more relevant to an admin user previously on a team plan.

Churn Need Not Be Permanent

A reactivation strategy should be part of every PLG company’s growth strategy to ensure that churn is not permanent. And, yes, product-led reactivation campaigns are worth the investment. 

It is tough to regain the trust of a churned customer but not impossible. An enticing product update and relevant offer might just win them back. The key to running a successful PLG reactivation campaign lies in personalizing the message. Tailor the emails based on the product activity events of a former customer to make the campaign relevant and timely. 

Share or Invite Emails

Studies show that referral strategies are a great way in the B2B SaaS industry to acquire new users. The reason is the user's trust in a colleague’s recommendation. Statistically, customers gained through referrals also have a better product-customer fit, higher conversion rate, and are more loyal. 

Think of how you got started on Slack. Word of mouth is not a cliché but an effective growth strategy to compound user acquisition in PLG. 

Scaling Acquisition

How often do your best customers and product champions organically share their amazing product experience with their network purely out of delight? 

You already know that this happens so rarely and is not enough to fuel a viral growth loop. Waiting for organic word of mouth to catch on might keep you waiting for a while.

A user’s positive product experience and a personal recommendation to their team or friends can set off a self-sustaining and perpetual PLG growth loop for your business. All you need to do is to give them a little push. 

Share or Invite emails are one of the most effective ways to encourage your happy customers to spread positive vibes about your product. Let’s see how.

Invite to Collaborate

Many B2B SaaS products are built to enable or ease collaboration at work. The value of such products increases as more users start using them creating a network effect.

While clicking on the in-built ‘Invite’ button is convenient, emails do a better job when the invitation has to be relayed to a team, multiple teams, or even to invite new employees to join the workspace. 

Here are some invite email examples from top PLG companies. 

PLG invite emails need not be limited to joining a team workspace. Product-led companies can build campaigns in varied contexts such as  asking customers to invite their team to try a new limited access feature, a new product’s beta version, join the product’s user community, etc.

You can also leverage email to remind the sender if the invitation is not accepted yet. Asana drove it home with this email. 

Share an Outcome

Not all B2B SaaS products have the advantage of in-built virality or network effect.

But, any PLG business can benefit from creating curiosity around what can be done using their product. Recognize and celebrate the customer’s milestones and achievements while encouraging them to share the outcome or experience. 

Think of shareable dashboards, reports, designs, templates, and any possible outcome derived by the user using your product. Encourage both team and social media sharing too.

PLG companies run campaigns to congratulate users on their achievements and milestones crossed using the product. You can double down on this opportunity to acquire new users by adding a CTA to share their work with the world. 

This is an email campaign that works universally for all PLG models and products. 

The first campaign launch can be nerve-racking for a marketer (or anyone, TBH). We at Inflection love celebrating customer milestones with a high-five and encourage our customers to proudly share their first campaign launch. 

Loom celebrates their users’ first video recorded and encourages sharing it. Sumo Logic suggests sharing dashboards with the user’s team. 

Any PLG model in any product category can succeed from a campaign that encourages sharing the results of using your product. Because user-generated content with proof of what your product is capable of is the best kind of product review you can ask for. 

Incentivize Sharing 

Good old referrals get the job done when the customer needs extra motivation to invite friends to your product. 

In PLG businesses, a referral need not offer a discount or gift coupon. Referrals can unlock new product usage limits or premium features for the referrer and also for the referred. 

Here are some examples.

Trello offers a choice to earn enough credits by inviting new users instead of paying for an upgrade. Webflow’s email offers exclusive product access and Dropbox shows you the benefit of inviting users and suggests inviting more to keep adding on extra storage space for free. 

Personalized PLG Invite Emails for The Win

You’ve optimized your product experience, measured customer satisfaction, and emailed all your existing customers and product champions asking them to invite friends. The existing customers get incentives for sharing, new users who accept the invite might as well, and you acquire more users. Everyone wins!

Yeah…not quite! 😐

Imagine sending an ‘Invite your team’ email to all your customers. It makes sense to customers who just paid for or upgraded to a Team plan but not to an individual user. The same message is helpful for an admin user in an Enterprise account but will not have an impact if sent to a CXO customer - a buyer but not a product user. 

You might have the best-loved product in the category but a generic message asking customers to send out invites will not have much impact. 

Ditch generic invitations. Get personal! 

Personalize your PLG share, invite, and referral emails to the customer and speak to them 1-1. Remind them of your product’s value and encourage them to share it with their teammates, friends, and extended network - which in turn has more benefits. 

You can personalize PLG share or invite emails depending on the type of product and your PLG strategy. 

For products that deliver more value with collaboration, the ‘Invite your team’ email should ideally be part of the onboarding process. Your email has to be a timely reminder, especially during a trial period. 

Leverage an onboarding micro survey to understand more about your customer, their team, and their goals with your product to customize this message. 

Send them a reminder if some of their teammates didn’t accept the product invite. Like Asana does in the example above. 

You can also create urgency by adding a time limit (if relevant) and maybe even by offering a personalized onboarding session with customer success to speed up adding team members. 

Add an email in the campaign if the customer account has a buyer who is not an active product user with an offer to add a free-of-cost viewer seat. This benefits in two ways. 

1. The decision-maker gets to witness your product value first-hand and
2. Makes the sales pitch for expansion and upgrade easier

You can also personalize milestone emails congratulating your customer and suggest sharing their accomplishments with the world. Personalizing the referral emails with a customized code can help you keep track of the rewards and the number of invitations sent and accepted from one customer. 

Compounding User Acquisition with Personalized PLG Invite Emails

The product-led growth (PLG) business model thrives on a delightful product experience. Get it right and you just need to encourage your satisfied customers to share their delightful experience with the world. 

Your happy customers can be the NOS you need to boost that growth loop for your PLG business. But, oftentimes the customers need a little extra push to share their product experience. A personalized PLG share or invite emails delivered with the right context and right incentives can help spark that interest to share. 

Upsell and Cross-Sell Emails

Growth at all costs? In this economy?!

Economic downturn or not, businesses can’t afford growth at all costs, forever. Sustainable growth beats the “growth at all costs” strategy in the long run. Healthy product-led growth is scalable, profitable, and manageable without bleeding cash. 

Measuring Growth

Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is the golden metric to measure sustainable growth for a product-led growth (PLG) business. A SaaS business with healthy growth and profitability shows an NRR of around 90% in SMBs and more than 100% in enterprises. Many PLG companies that went public like Snowflake, Twilio, etc. have an NRR of over 125%.

We are going to talk about why and how to improve expansion revenue in this post. 

Why Focus on Expansion Revenue?

According to Patrick Campbell, the founder and CEO of Profitwell, the top performers in growth have doubled the expansion revenue. This significantly impacts the company’s overall performance because upselling to customers costs only $0.27 for every $1 in annual revenue they bring. 

The same study also found that high-growth companies get nearly 40% of their total revenue from expansion. 

The significantly lower acquisition cost (CAC), profitability, and improved customer life time value (LTV). Saves you time and resources in creating awareness because the customer already knows your product and trusts your brand.

What’s not to love about expansion revenue?

What is expansion revenue anyway?

Expansion revenue is the additional revenue from the existing customers of your PLG business and the sum of upsells (higher priced plan than the one your customer is already using) and cross-sells (additional products and services from your company). 

When customers love your product and are willing to spend more because they can experience greater value, you got an excellent NPS score right there. Good expansion revenue is a customer satisfaction metric.

Not as glamorous as acquiring net new revenue, but expansion revenue is more profitable for a PLG company, hands down. 

How To Improve Expansion Revenue?

By upselling and/or cross-selling. 

In a PLG strategy, you might have already set up pop-up windows, in-product notifications, and alert messages to remind your users when it is time to upgrade. This is a great way to deliver timely reminders and nudges to users. When the decision is obvious, they click on the button, enter payment details, and carry on using the premium version of your product. 

This is not the only way to earn expansion revenue though. 

When it comes to upgrades, oftentimes your user is not the decision maker or buyer. And, the buyer need not be an active user. So, your PLG go-to-market team needs to employ a communication channel other than the product itself to pitch an upsell to the right audience.

No prizes for guessing but, good old email does the job for you.

Let’s see some examples of how it can be done. 

From the Beginning

In a product-led GTM strategy, upselling starts in the free trial period. A message to upgrade can be part of the PLG onboarding campaign and there are multiple routes you can take to successfully convert a free trial user. 

1. Create urgency with reminders that the trial period is running out and what the users will miss out on. Zapier informs that all the zaps you created using paid features will be paused and suggests upgrading to continue uninterrupted use.  

2. Suggest upgrading after the trial ended with options to retrieve the outcome of your product’s usage. Maybe subtly remind them how life sucks without your product? Like DocuSign did here.

3. Explain why upgrading is a good idea. Basecamp lists out how you can keep everything your team needs in one place. 

Land and Expand 

This PLG upsell email can be of different types depending on the type of product, your PLG GTM model, and also the customer. 

Upgrading for an individual user working on a personal project might be to access premium features or extend the product usage limit. Whereas a team account’s upgrade means additional seats or more user roles, like an additional team manager with unrestricted access. 

Take Asana’s example. Their upsell email reminds the customer of the seat limit and suggests upgrading. 

Fullstory sends a weekly product usage summary and a warning when the user is near the usage threshold. It’s great that the user is adopting and adoring your product, but send a reminder before you have to hit pause on usage.

You can leverage the opportunity to discuss a better plan to ensure uninterrupted product use and establish customer relationships. An easy upgrade CTA button also works when the customer is about to hit a usage limit or wants to access higher-tier features.

Extra Sweeten the Deal

Discounts are one way to do this. But, in PLG you can also offer extended usage, product credits, limited-time premium feature access, additional seats in the team plan, white-glove onboarding, and so on. An extra slice of monetary as well as product value gives that extra boost to customers on the fence. Setting a time limit on the offer will help faster upgrades too. 

You can also use occasions like product anniversaries, feature launches, etc., to offer extra special deals on immediate upgrades. 

Show Value, Remind, Repeat 

Who doesn’t like getting their money’s worth? 

Compare basic and premium versions, show easy ways to reach a goal and highlight the value of upgrading. 

Proof of value works in upselling to free users and paid customers as well. The examples above cover highlighting product value to convert free users in the previous section. Let’s see how that works in upselling to paid customers.  

They saw value in your product and that’s why they became your customer in the first place. The idea here is to keep reminding the customers of how awesome your product is, especially after they bought a premium version. 

Your goal here is to ensure your customers that they are getting their money’s worth while suggesting a higher or additional value. Both upselling and cross-selling can be the theme for this email. 

Product-led recap emails and newsletters can be great opportunities to show a summary of the value delivered by your product over time.  The recap emails work in converting a free user as well as in persuading a paid customer to upgrade. 

You can minimize the risk of downgrades and churn if you follow the value mantra in your auto-renewal emails. It might not be too crazy to pitch an upgrade in the auto-renewal email if a higher-tier plan benefits the customer.

You can also seize the opportunity to rope in sales or customer success to discuss a better and more valuable plan for the customer.

Additional services

It’s like asking if the customer wants fries and soda with their burger. 

Think of any add-ons your customer can receive value from. A different product that compliments the one customer already paid for, an added service like a dedicated customer success manager for the account, and so on. 

Cross-selling in PLG companies need not start with a hard-sell email. Let the customer get early access or a limited trial to let them understand the value. 

Check out Invision’s cross-selling campaign for their new product - ‘Freehand’ and Canva Docs offering users to try out the newly launched products. 

Optimize Upselling and Cross-Selling Campaigns

We talked about various opportunities to run email campaigns to drive PLG expansion revenue. But the billion-dollar question is, do they all work? 

Yes, if you optimize it for efficiency. 

Here are some best practices you can follow to get results from PLG to upsell and cross-sell campaigns. 

1. Figure out product signals

PLG companies use product qualified leads (PQLs) as reliable judges of user intent to buy. If you haven’t identified PQLs already, it should be on the top of your list today. 

PQLs are the remedy to the ‘spread and pray’ method. Setting up the right product thresholds will help you identify buying readiness better. 

Don’t stop with figuring out the PQLS, optimizing them if and when necessary is also important to keep up the efficiency. 

2. Combine product signals and firmographics

PQLs can be a great indicator of the right time and user to try and upsell. But, if your target customer is not an individual user, but a team or enterprise account then you need a bit more to get the purchase intent right. 

Product Qualified Accounts (PQAs)  are a combination of product signals and firmographic information such as team and company size, customer’s role in the org, etc. Identifying and optimizing PQAs is key for the expansion campaign to be more effective.

3. Personalize PLG at scale

Mining PQAs gives you all the necessary details you need for tailoring expansion campaigns at scale. Tailoring PLG emails that speak 1-1 with the users and buyers in your target accounts at scale becomes easier when you got the purchase readiness right. 

Let’s say you want to upsell the annual subscription target account of 50-100 team members on a monthly billing cycle when they are over 80% of the product usage quota with more than 1 week remaining. You can set up the PQA to trigger an internal alert to Sales when all the criteria are met. And, at the same time, automated emails like the one below can be triggered. 

And, the email that goes to the buyer’s email can be from the CSM’s email address suggesting an upgrade to an annual plan with details of the benefits for the customer. 

Roping in Sales or CS teams can help PLG companies to forge a better buying relationship with the target customer. So, your emails can also encourage scheduling a call. When the team has all the relevant information on the customer’s product and CRM activity, the conversation becomes more authentic and easier. 

Get inspired by any (or all) of the examples discussed in this post. Compare features, highlight value metrics, introduce urgency, and sweeten the deal. These campaigns work when you can personalize the PLG upsell and cross-sell emails. 

Spearheading Expansion Revenue with Personalized PLG Upsell and Cross-sell Campaigns

Expansion revenue seems like a long shot, especially when everyone is cutting back on their expenses. 

But businesses have requirements and problems to solve any day. Identifying account expansion opportunities at scale is crucial for product-led growth businesses to achieve sustainable growth. 

Powering personalized PLG upsell and cross-sell emails with the right product activity and CRM data boosts campaign efficiency. Your upsell and cross-selling campaigns are automatically effective when they speak directly to the customers’ needs.

Abandoned Cart Emails

If your business’s go-to-market strategy is product-led, you must have already simplified the purchase process (at least for the basic pricing tier). Your users can start using your product’s premium features with an easy credit card or PayPal transaction as soon as they decide to. Despite the many, many advantages, this ease of buying also brings the persistent problem often faced by B2C and D2C businesses. 

Cart abandonment.

Cart Abandonment in PLG 

In product-led growth (PLG) companies, the sales cycle is intentionally short. It is a common scenario in PLG businesses the basic tiers of the product are purchased via a relatively simple online transaction. Same as on an online shopping site, prospective customers do leave before completing the transaction sometimes. Abandoning carts is a menace faced by PLG companies. 

Though there are no exclusive studies done on this topic in the B2B SaaS industry or for PLG businesses, it is safe to say that product-led growth (PLG) businesses face similar issues to consumer businesses that come with huge user databases and massive volumes of product activity. 

Why Abandon Carts?

The top 3 reasons why metaphorical carts are abandoned even in the B2B SaaS industry are:

1. Distractions

What can I say? We live in a world of distractions. Even if the customer had the highest possible intent to purchase, sometimes work or life may get in the way. There could be a hundred different reasons why this happens.

2. Indecisiveness

The software industry can be a cut-throat business. Even if you are a blue ocean product, competition will spring up eventually. Your customers always have the option to compare your product with competitors. It’s not surprising that a potential customer wants to compare the pricing and features one last time before entering their billing details. 

3. Technical issues 

Probably, the most embarrassing reason for lost business. Technical glitches can happen on either end in spite of using the best available transaction processing service there is. 

Broadly, every disengaged prospect at the time of purchase didn’t go through with it because of these reasons. And, most of the time this is a temporary churn. You still have a chance to re-engage and win back the user or prospect with a little persuasion.

Why Abandoned Cart Emails?

From optimizing pricing strategy to showing notifications in the product, there are definitely measures you can take to optimize the product experience and on your website to mitigate churn at the time of purchase. Bringing a distracted user or a customer back to the product or website to reconsider a purchase without losing the buying momentum is a huge challenge. And, cart abandonment emails do that successfully. 

Universally, cart abandonment emails have one of the best open rates (more than 40%) and have a 10.7% conversion rate. Product-led abandoned cart emails can re-engage users and prospects w and help convert them to paid customers. 

Converting Abandoned Carts

For distracted and indecisive prospects

Abandoned cart emails can be just a simple reminder that a distracted user needs to get back to the billing page. Remind them where they left off and direct them to the billing page. 

Headspace is the perfect example. Distracted users are also their ICP, they acknowledge this and offer support with any questions the user might have.

If your users experienced value from your product and if your pricing tiers are not exorbitant, a simple nudge to pick up where they left off should do the job. Although distractions are a reason, it is also possible that the user is still pondering over the decision, waiting for the boss’s approval,  or not entirely convinced of the value for money.

There are more ways to persuade a user still on the fence with the right email. 

1. Answer their ‘why’ to ease the decision-making. List out your value propositions in the email that is relevant to the pricing tier and to the user.

2. Your message can include steps to make a payment, upgrade, and downgrade or cancel the subscription if and when needed. The ease of modifying billing preferences can be encouraging.

3. Compare features in different tiers (similar to a pricing page) highlighting the ones that give you a competitive advantage.

4. Offer a free and limited trial of features in the premium tiers before their account is charged.

5. In the case of team and enterprise accounts where there are multiple decision-makers, suggest a product demo Sales or Customer Success for existing customers.

Sauce Labs (an Inflection customer) sends their first reminder email on the same day their users visit the pricing page. The PLG abandoned cart email lists down the value of their product as reasons to complete the purchase. They also show the starting price, a link to a detailed pricing page, and a big red button to complete the transaction. They send a reminder promptly 2 days after to follow up.

The campaign is a huge success and they get nearly 20 purchases per month from the campaign.

For Transaction Failures

Transaction failures happen all the time. It could be because of a temporary glitch, an expired card, issues with foreign currency transactions, and so on. The transaction failure intimation email can also have links to alternative payment methods so the customer can finish making the purchase. 

Payment failures can be a real menace if the customer is on a recurring plan. It’s always best to identify potential payment failures than deal with the aftermath. 

Slack sends a reminder to their users about the upcoming auto-renewal. Squarespace’s email informs and encourages the user to check if ‘auto-renewal’ is enabled and make sure the billing details are right for uninterrupted use. Help Scout takes a slightly different route. They warn about the risk of failed payment and give enough time to make the purchase. 

These emails work because they highlight what the customer might lose if the payment doesn’t go through. And, the polite reminder with a gracious time limit makes sure the customer relationship with the business is not strained.  

For Abandoned Demo Requests

If you are a PLG business with an enterprise tier that needs Sales to step in or if you are running a sales-led motion in parallel, you have one more scenario unique to B2B that is the equivalent of cart abandonment. 

Abandoning a demo request. 

It could be because of a technical glitch with your scheduling software, unavailability of slots in the customer’s time zone, or plain old distraction.

Reach out with an email. Send an abandoned demo request email to your customer to find out the issue, and remind them of the advantages of a personalized demo. Or, do one better and suggest booking a slot with a team member who is available in the customer’s time zone.  

In PLG companies, sending an async demo video, or inviting them to test the premium product in a sandbox environment works too; a human 1-1 interaction might not be feasible every time. option. 

Tips to Craft The Best PLG Abandoned Cart Email

Some of the tried and tested abandoned cart email best practices we can borrow from our B2C counterparts to support PLG motion are:

Tick-Tock

Time is of the essence to win back the customer who already thought about purchasing your PLG product. You’ll have a better chance of succeeding with the sale if you can strike a balance with your email timing. 

Automate triggered emails that go after a reasonable time delay after a product qualified lead (PQL) or product qualified account (PQA) is flagged. You do not want to alarm your users while they are finishing up entering the credit card details and at the same time, you don’t want to miss leveraging the purchase momentum.

Follow-Up

One email reminder might not be enough especially to convince a user to try out other products. Follow-up with value reminders, value and price comparisons, and relevant offers to persuade the user on the fence. Show how close they are to start using the premium features in just a few steps.

Personalize

Your PLG cart abandonment emails are the most impactful when they address the exact reason behind it. Craft your message with details that are hyper-personal to the user. 

Use the clues your users left in their product activity such as trying to use a gated feature, their firmographic data such as team size, and interactions with your website such as visiting the terms of service page to personalize the purchase or demo request abandonment email. For example,  trigger an email to the admin and buyer of a PQA who just visited the pricing page suggesting a 1-1 conversation with their CSM.

Personalize the incentives while following up to get back a distracted buyer to complete the payment process quickly. 

Boosting Conversions with Personalized PLG Abandoned Cart Emails 

You might have the best product with the most intuitive user experience that is priced just right after a lot of market research and expert advice. If your free-to-paid conversion rate is still not up to par with the industry standards or if you are aiming for a better-than-average conversion rate, then it’s time to take a harder look at your ‘check out’ process. 

Product-led B2B SaaS businesses often employ simplified sales processes at least for their product’s basic tiers to make trying and buying their product easy for the end-user. With the transactional ease comes the abandoned cart problem commonly faced by consumer businesses.

Abandoned cart emails are popular in B2C because of their success rate and the same best practices can be applied for better conversion rates in PLG businesses too. 

A great PLG cart abandonment email is personal and contextual. It is delivered at the right time to the PQLs and PQAs with the right information and motivation to complete the purchase. 

TL;DR

The key takeaways from this guide are

• One-size-fits-all doesn’t work.

• Tailored customer experiences for the win at every stage of the customer journey.

• Your product is the primary channel for growth but, you should leverage emails to reach out to distracted and disengaged customers at scale.

• Personalizing communication is the only way to win and retain customers.

• Scaling automated communication without compromising on personalization is crucial for building a sustainable growth loop for your PLG business.

About Inflection.io

Inflection is the first B2B growth automation platform built for product-led companies. 

Founded by ex-Marketo executives, our vision is to build the world's best growth automation solution for product-led companies. Combining the best of marketing automation with the best of customer communication to create an all-in-one solution for managing self-service and sales-led motions. The power of Marketo, simplicity of Intercom, data of Snowflake.

Get started here to watch Inflection in action.