Tips for Better Product Update Emails

Tips for Better Product Update Emails


What is the difference between the content marketing and the product marketing?

The Content marketing is a lead generation tool, it’s an education platform, and a brand building strategy. Goals are centered around audience growth and engagement.

The Product marketing is very different from the Content marketing. A product marketer aim is to understand every facet of customer’s experience. They need to know why the customers use the product in the first place and how the new features and the updates can entice more customers to start joining.

Of course, there is an overlap and in some cases, a marketing manager can be handling both roles. Bridging the gap from education to the activation is not an easy task. And while we are oversimplifying the role of the product marketers, I am sure you can already see the importance of the collaboration between the product and the marketing teams.

Product update emails are one of the example where the content and product teams must harmonize to have a successful outcome. In this post, we will break down the elements of a great product update email and then offer some examples you can use as your inspiration in your own marketing.

 

Know your audience, speak to them.

Is the SaaS world, every business wants to reach the product, the marketing and the engineering teams. The nature of most the SaaS companies requires the buy-in from all of the three groups for the customer to start realizing the full value of the product. This makes it difficult to keep focus on one audience and to speak to them directly.

Engineers, for example, will be mostly interested in the speed improvements, the uptime and the integration, while marketers are more quick to respond to better reporting and also analytics tools. If your product updates has the both, then you might end up just diluting the email and therefore speaking to no one.

To define your target audience is a very important task that should guide the marketing, the sales and the product development. When it comes to the time of queueing up a product update email, the nitty gritty work of the creating buyer personas should be done already. But just in case it is not, here are a few things that you should consider.

 

Improve customer retention

Emails that include the features and the product updates will help to keep your customers engaged.

Send killer product updates

Product updates should be written for the true fans of yours. That is not to say that other people won’t find them interesting, but the information about a product is not a lead-gen tool or a sales tactic it is just a fuel for an already burning fire.

It is very difficult if not impossible for you to serve two masters. You need to decide whether your target audience is marketers, a developer or another group and then segment them accordingly. It is likely that there is a crossover but do your best to just focus the message for each target group.
Here we have two examples of product update emails that are speaking directly to a target audience.

1 Example: Strava

The Strava is a mobile app that helps the runners and the cyclists track distance and pace. It is equally very useful for each group, but they have to segment their product update emails based on the information they have gathered in their onboarding process.
Strava makes sure that they know their customers so that they can speak to them directly.

2 Example : Canva

The Canva have decided long ago that they would target the marketers who need to design their work but do not have advanced design skills. The canva product makes it easy for anybody to create and to export beautiful designs for your social media and other marketing campaigns. You’ll see that their product updates reflect that. Even the design types that they offer indicate that this email was intended for someone working in the marketing.

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