As a SaaS business, you want to make your product a habit. This is what will help improve conversions, loyalty, expansions, and referrals — four essential ingredients for growing a sustainable, healthy business.

To do this, you need to utilize behavioral data in targeted, automated lifecycle campaigns that help nudge your customers onto the next stage while supporting their success with your product.

While each SaaS business will have its nuances and needs, there are four automated lifecycle campaigns that form the foundations of every SaaS product's marketing. Get these right, and you'll get the time and space you need to build the splashy, above-ground stuff that gets you noticed.

4 essential SaaS marketing automation campaigns

These 4 SaaS marketing automation campaigns might take some time to set up initially, but that upfront investment in time will give you a solid foundation on which you can build your marketing castle. They are:

• Lead nurture

• Onboarding

• NPS pop-up and follow-up journey

• Value realization

Lead nurture campaign

Nurturing your leads is essential as a SaaS business — it helps keep your product top of mind and nudges your leads to take the next step in the journey, whether that's signing up for a free trial, downloading an app, or becoming a paying customer.

Lead nurture campaigns share helpful and relevant content that builds on itself to tell a story about who you are, the problem you solve, and why your new lead should convert. Depending on your ICP and how you acquire leads, you may need a number of lead nurture campaigns in play at any one time. For example, if you acquire leads via a webinar, you will want to start sharing content related to the webinar topic, and then move on to other, related topics. If your lead is a handraiser who completed booked or interacted with a demo, your nurture journey may be more directly product-focused.

Onboarding journey

User onboarding is one of the most important parts of the entire customer journey for a SaaS business.

For companies with a PLG approach, this is the campaign that will help shift your free users into a paid plan, but a faster time to value realization can impact your bottom line even if you do not have a freemium or free trial model. Customers who successfully onboard and quickly realize the value of a product are more likely to go on to become loyal customers who expand and refer others.

A good onboarding journey should use behavioral data to target users with relevant information and nudge them to complete an onboarding journey that results in value realization. This might include:

• Welcome email

• First action or getting started checklist

• Split path based on behavior

• Reminder email or next best action

• Reminder to choose a plan

• Request or feedback

The journey template below includes both popups and emails to nudge a new user to complete a checklist step. It can easily be expanded upon and adapted to suit any SaaS product and customer journey. We've also linked to a trial expiration reminder template which can be a handy addition to the new user journey if your product has a free trial.

Generate reviews after an NPS survey template

Regularly checking in on how your users feels about your product is essential to increasing loyalty and improving the customer experience. One of the simplest ways to do this is with a reoccurring net promoter score (NPS) survey journey.

The NPS customer journey can be completely automated — you can set the popup survey to appear every 90 days, request additional feedback from detractors, and ask promoters to leave a public review or testimonial. You can also set up automations to alert key team members when a large account leaves a low score so they can follow up directly to proactively prevent churn.

Once this journey is set up, it's basically set and forget. All you'll need to do is keep an eye on your scores, reviews, and have success or support jump in to help save detractors before they churn.

Value realization

If your customer is not continually reminded of the value your product is delivering, they will look elsewhere and become a churn risk. Much of this is in regular usage — logging in, achieving stuff, solving problems, and collaborating — but setting up an automated value realization campaign can help reaffirm the important role your product plays in their life.

One great example is from Grammarly who send a weekly email that recaps the number of words checked and the individual user's results. It strikes a balance between reaffirming its positive impact on the user's work (look how many mistakes you would have made without Grammarly!) while celebrating the user themselves (look how much you wrote!) and creating a little friendly competition (could you place in a higher percentage next week?).

A value realization campaign doesn't have to be this frequent — some products will only need a monthly, quarterly, or annual send. When you're considering your options here, think about when your customer's renewal will land. You don't want to be overtly transactional — in other words, don't send the email two weeks before a contract renewal comes up — but it is worth identifying a cadence that helps to reduce churn.

This yearly activity recap template uses a JSON data endpoint or custom fields to populate activity figures that show your users how much they've achieved with your product. It can be adapted to suit any business type or activities.

Final word

Once these four automated campaigns are in place, you'll have a solid base to build on. While some of these are set-and-forget, it's important not to forget forever. Schedule regular check-ins to see how your automated lifecycle campaigns are performing, make optimizations, and look for new opportunities for growth.