Three email upgrades most founders overlook

Jason M. Lemkin is the founder of SaaStr.ai, a community and events business for SaaS founders and executives.

If you want to learn how to build and scale SaaS businesses, Jason is your guy.

I took a look at his email marketing, and I found three easy upgrades he can make to get more leads and sales for his events.

Here they are:

I subscribed to SaaStr's emails from two different sites.

The SaaStr site.

The SaaStr annual's site.

Sadly, I did not get a welcome email from either of them.

This is bad because if you do not have a good welcome flow, all of your email metrics go down over time.

A good welcome email does three things.

Sets the expectation for email communication.

Encourages people to reply.

Adds links to content to show them what to expect.

Getting people to open your welcome emails improves your deliverability like crazy.

I would encourage Jason and his team to create a welcome flow that effectively onboards subscribers into his funnel.

This is a tactical thing, but I noticed that a lot of the emails I got from Jason and SaaStr were getting clipped by Gmail.

I looked into it, and it turns out Gmail has a limit on the HTML file size.

Basically, an email that has an HTML file size of over 102 KB gets clipped, and as a result, Gmail hides part of its content.

You have probably seen this yourself.

The email cuts off and there is a link that says "View entire message."

Most people do not click that link.

To avoid this, Jason and his team should test the email size of his newsletter before they send them out to avoid getting their emails clipped.

I looked at SaaStr's newsletter, and I cannot help but feel like Jason and his team are using it only as a distribution channel for the rest of his content.

Blog posts. Social content. Everything gets dumped into the newsletter.

It can quickly become overwhelming because each newsletter has 3-10 different CTAs and 3-5 different big ideas.

I understand why that is.

Jason has a huge audience, and each person follows him for a different reason.

One segment might want to scale and sell their companies.

Another might follow him for his hiring advice.

Trying to serve all of those people with the same content is a mistake.

What Jason and his team should do instead.

Send a short survey in his welcome flow to learn more about his audience.

Create 3-5 different segments based on the responses to that survey.

Create a specific newsletter for each segment. He can curate specific insights there as well as share unique ones.

This would skyrocket his engagement because he can appeal to every segment with specific content instead of trying to cram all of his insights into one newsletter.

He can also charge his newsletter sponsors higher prices because he will send them traffic from specific and segmented audiences.

These three upgrades are not complicated.

Add a welcome flow.

Test email size before sending.

Segment your audience and send relevant content.

Most founders skip these because they are focused on the content itself.

But the infrastructure around your content matters just as much.

Keep dominating,

Tanyo