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What attracted you to email marketing, and how did you get to where you are today?
The story goes back to 2013, when I started building an email list for UI Breakfast, my UI/UX consulting practice. It was my number one channel for selling books and services.
Then we started Userlist together with my co-founder in 2017, and it went full throttle from there. These days we’re immersed in email marketing for SaaS companies, from strategy to execution.
What’s your favorite email hack?
An “evergreen newsletter” is one of my favorite concepts. It’s a super long email campaign that drips out your best content every 2-4 weeks, on autopilot. It can be as long as 1-2 years worth of content. Such setup helps marketers get off the hamster wheel of broadcasting.
When it comes to execution, I love using “snippets” which is a Userlist feature for reusable blocks of text. For example, inserting a greeting line is as easy as typing a variable, e.g. {{snippets.intro}}.
What are most SaaS marketers getting wrong when it comes to email automation?
Apart from not doing anything at all? 🙂
The most common mistake is “thinking small” which results in a large number of tiny campaigns triggered by individual events. E.g. “congratulations on your first project” as a separate campaign. This is creepy and not effective.
Instead, we recommend to “think big” and orchestrate the entire lifecycle (see this guide for illustrations). First you segment your customers by lifecycle stage, and when they join a certain stage you trigger a corresponding campaign.
This way, you end up with 3-5 bigger campaigns. Weaving new emails into them is much easier than setting up new campaigns.
How can email marketers create more personalized experiences without the help of a dev?
The key is to plan upfront and have a solid back-end integration between the product and your email marketing platform. This way you work with your developer once to track all the data, and then it’s all yours to play with. The rest depends on the email marketing platform. We recommend Userlist, of course 🙂
What’s in your email marketing toolbox?
Hardware:
- Razer Kiyo Pro webcam
- Samson Q2U mic
- Rode PSA1 studio boom arm
- Elgato Key Light Air for the lights
Software:
- Userlist for both marketing and lifecycle email
- Notion for planning
- Google Docs for collaborative editing
- SavvyCal for integrating a variety of call types
- Livestorm and Pitch for the webinars
Which SaaS companies nail email marketing?
We love what SavvyCal — our beloved customers — are doing with their newsletters and feature updates. Their product images are always a source of envy (and inspiration).
Among others, Notion stands out with their sophisticated illustrations and recognizable writing style.
How do you manage work/life balance?
In addition to running a software product, I’m an avid podcaster with two shows under the belt, and a mom of three kids. So the term work/life balance means a lot 🙂
Sure enough, things get overwhelming.
The key is to delegate, set up processes, and focus on the important things. You just can’t have it all.
For example, I’m not trying to kill it on social media with continuous personal updates. Instead, we focus on publishing 1-2 high-quality, long-form pieces per month.
Much love,
Andy
Andy has spent two decades building email programs for brands and agencies, and now co-runs Email Love: the inspiration gallery of 483,000+ emails and the Figma plugin that lets teams design, build, and export production-ready email without leaving their design file. He writes about email design systems, production workflow, and where the industry is heading.
Customer.io delivers more impact from every message–unifying data, messaging, and AI into one platform so every customer interaction gets smarter over time. We help teams build personalized campaigns across email, SMS, push, in-app, and webhooks, using their own first-party data to reach the right people with the right message at the right moment. AI is built into the platform to remove the grunt work, letting marketers focus on strategy, not setup. Over 9,000 brands trust us to power their messaging.
