Aaroe Writing SaaS Email Breakdown: Featuring Bonjoro
Today I’m giving an in depth email breakdown of a welcome email from one of my favorite SaaS companies, Bonjoro. Bonjoro is a company worth studying. Not only do they offer a unique, effective and user friendly software solution to their users, their marketing is on point. They do a great job with brand personality, building a connection with their audience, and they communicate frequently, and effectively, using email marketing.
If you are a SaaS company, e-com app developer or an agency looking to increase visibility and conversions with email marketing, you can learn a lot from today’s email breakdown.
About Bonjoro
Bonjoro is a customer experience SaaS solution that gives brands a unique way to connect, human-to-human, on digital platforms. Bonjoro provides an intuitive CRM (customer relationship manager) tool where brands can record personalized videos with embedded links in customer emails.
The Bonjoro platform allows brands to identify key moments in the customer journey such as website browsing, first purchase, benchmark CLVs, re-engagement etc., and alert the team when a customer has triggered these events. Then, someone from the brand records a quick, completely authentic, personalized video, and sends it off to the customer in an automated email.
Bonjoro’s innovative tools boast incredibly high success rates, however the solution naturally brings up immediate objections for prospective buyers. The most common objection is… “Is recording personalized videos worth my time?” Bonjoro uses their own tool, as well as effective email marketing strategy, to answer these objections, communicate their brand values, educate leads on how to succeed using their tool, and ultimately drive conversions to their paid plans.
Bonjoro’s Welcome Email
You can view the entire welcome email from Bonjoro here or just read along as I break the email down into its parts. I’ll explain why and how this email achieves key objectives. But first, I want to highlight a few overall notes about why email is exemplary of SaaS email marketing done right.
- The email is from a person at Bonjoro and uses a familiar, friendly tone, immediately making the prospect feel as though they are a part of the Bonjoro “family.”
- The email is mostly text, with a few graphics added in for the purposes of framing.
- The email gives plenty of specific details about Bonjoro, but in every paragraph, the information is communicated in such a way that’s relevant to the prospect reading.
- The email is set in a specific place and time and includes both 1. Calls-to-action for the prospect who is ready to act now and 2. Future pacing for the prospect who needs to be nurtured in future emails before they’ll be ready to act.
Free Trial Opt In
Before I get into the email copy, some background on how a prospect ends up with this email in their inbox.
On Bonjoro’s homepage you are immediately asked to start a free trial by filling out a simple, 3-field form. Bonjoro allows their email automations to nurture and qualify their leads for them, without the risk of wasting unnecessary sales energy or turning perfect prospects away at the “door.”
SIDE NOTE: I can not tell you how many SaaS companies and e-com app websites over complicate their opt-in form. They are trying to filter out bad leads, bots and spammers by qualifying their opt-in traffic. But the result of such heavy, laborious opt-in procedures (and I’m calling anything with more than 4 fields to fill out, and any questions beyond basic identifying questions, heavy and laborious) is that many good leads and slightly warm prospects give up before ever making a connection with the company.
I’m not sure how Bonjoro is bringing in cold and warm leads to their website, but a quick search in the facebook ad library yields “0” results, so my guess is Bojoro is using plenty of cold email and organic social.
Email Breakdown
Section 1: From and Subject Line
This email came to my promotions tab in gmail, which isn’t the best. So that’s a deliverability issue Bonjoro could work on for the future.
The subject line “A Beary Warm Welcome” stands out while still being straight forward, and it is wonderfully “on brand”. Not every company can get away with spicing up an otherwise boring subject line, but this speaks to the benefit of having a clearly defined brand, and in this case, a playful one.
This email comes from a real person, “Simon” from Bonjoro. I love how they do this with all of their emails. This is a great way to personalize emails without having to identify a single personality in the company who is ostensibly writing all the emails. However, “from Bonjoro” provides continuity for the reader across their entire email marketing strategy.
Section 2: Lead (and optional logo)
I support the choice not to use my first name in the salutation. There are differing opinions on the use of personalized fields in email automations. I think if you can adequately personalize the email without using the reader’s first name, you’ve won the day.
I like how the logo is small enough to allow the full lead to show on both desktop and mobile. When your copy and branding is right on target, a huge logo distracts. This email strikes a perfect balance.
This might be one of my favorite welcome email leads ever. It’s a fairly common opening, they paint a scene of the workers at “brand” getting excited over your appearance on the scene. This gets the reader’s attention, but can run the risk of getting an eye roll… Most prospects know better.
However, this one feels realistic. The scene is 100% believable but it still achieves the goal of making the reader feel like their addition to the brand is a big huge deal.
Section 3: Key Argument: Setting Expectations
One of the basic rules of email copywriting is that every email should have one single objective, getting the reader to take the next step, either mentally or actively.
This Bonjoro welcome email follows that principle fairly well. The purpose of this email is to let the reader know, take a mental step, what we can expect from the company in the next phase of our relationship. In this case the phase is the duration of the free trial, and we are promised guidance by Bonjoro throughout the course of our trial.
We aren’t just shown that single, clear concept with words… We’re even given a cartoon to illustrate the exact same point.
Notice how they slip in a line about the benefits of using their product here: “building next level relationships.”
However this line is in service of the larger goal of the email and it adds to and supports the core messaging.
This is beary, beary well done!
Section 4: Bullets
Every SaaS email has one thing in common. Bullets.
When you have a complex technical product, bullets are great way break up a wealth of information into impactful but easily consumable portions.
But these are no standard, dry and boring SaaS bullets. We’ve got:
- personality (in the parentheticals)
- Copy that focuses on YOU, the reader
- Future pacing where the reader can visualize something truly rewarding coming their way on their journey with Bonjoro
- A bright turquoise call to action smack in the middle!
- Even these bullets have bullets… keeping the information organized and clear.
I do notice that all the personality and visionary copy kind of drains out from these last two bullet points… they kind of feel like an afterthought. I’ll go into this more below, but I would actually leave out the second section of bullets, I think it distracts from the main objective of the email.
However, white space is a good thing, especially in the first email in a sequence. You don’t ever want to confuse your reader, you want to entice them and keep them coming back for more.
Section 5: The Close (with CTA)
The button copy in this email is very well done. Not only are we given big bright buttons, but the copy itself tells you exactly what will happen if your press those buttons, and it persuades you to want to take that next step.
But we’ve already been treated to a large CTA in the last section, so why throw in a second? If these were spaced out in the email, one link embedded in the ext, and the second as a button at the end, I would say this is a smart move. But these two CTAs don’t even go to the same place.
This first CTA follows along with the main objective of the email, getting the reader ready to engage with Bonjoro. It lands the reader on a welcome & tutorial page within the Bonjoro platform.
This second CTA connects with the second set of bullets and leads the reader to start recording those specific types of videos mentioned in the bullets.
I think all this extra information and multiple buttons may distract or worse, overwhelm the reader. I would suggest taking out all the information about the testimonials (the second set of bullets) and adding a second link in the text “above the fold” perhaps the word “guide” in the beginning of section 3.
I’m not a fan of the text portion of the “close” of this email, which isn’t a close at all, but rather it races on to an entirely new idea, one that could live in a follow up email all on it’s own.
But then they give us this adorable, on brand, on message, hopeful graphic that warms my heart and makes me think,
“awwwww shucks… what next?!”
Section 6: The P.S.
*Nada*
There is no P.S. in this email, but I think this is a missed opportunity. I mentioned above that the testimonial information from the second set of bullets, and the corresponding CTA could live in it’s own email. But an even better idea would be to place the information in the P.S.
Something like, “P.S. Ready to begin right away?” and then write the copy about the testimonials and throw in the button below.
Conclusion
If you are a SaaS company building out your welcome sequence, Bonjoro is a great company to study. They bring a strong brand identity, personalization, humor, humanity and credibility into their marketing strategy.
Even if you are a much more buttoned up brand and cartoons and puns are not really your style, email is a perfect chance to show your audience a softer, more personal side. With emails like the one above, your brand can begin to build a relationship with your prospects, one that convinces them you are the best solution for their current needs… as well as keeps them connected and loyal to your brand for many renewals to come.
Hi! I’m Annie Aaroe, a b2b email marketing strategist. To find out more about story-driven, conversion email copy and strategy that’s tailored for e-com apps and SaaS brands, visit my website, aaroewriting.com, or shoot me an email at annie@aaroewriting.com.