This is the latest version of an email which I send periodically, offering customers the opportunity to pre-pay for SaaS in return for a discount. The benefits to the SaaS company are better cash flow and reduced churn rate. The benefits to the customer are, well, in the email. This genre of email has produced hundreds of thousands of dollars in pre-pays for some companies I work with, and it rarely requires any more work than this example.
I've put $79 is as a placeholder for the cost of the user's plan. We calculate that for each account, naturally, along with the billing contact's name.
Subject: Save $79 on Appointment Reminder (and get a tax write-off) Formatting: 100% plain text. Gmail automatically links up the central link. From: Patrick McKenzie (Appointment Reminder) patrick@appointmentreminder.org
Hiya $CUSTOMER,
Thanks for being a customer of Appointment Reminder, which your business uses to reliably send out automated phone, text message, and email reminders to your customers -- decreasing no-shows and increasing revenue.
We're all about saving you money and administrative hassle, so here's a special deal: we'll give you one month of service free if you switch to annual billing. This will save you $79 a year. It also saves your bookkeeper a bit of work every month.
To switch, check out the details here: https://www.appointmentreminder.org/a/settings/yearly_billing
Many US businesses can book this as an expense in the current tax year, allowing you to write this off your present-year taxes. If you want an authoritative opinion on this, ask your accountant.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask. If you don't want to take advantage of yearly billing, no sweat! You can continue paying month to month. Just ignore this email. We won't bug you about it again, but you can always switch from your Payment Details screen in Appointment Reminder.
Regards,
Patrick McKenzie
Founder
Appointment Reminder
The first paragraph reminders the customer why they care about Appointment Reminder. We sell to businesses. Many times, the end-user of our product is not the person who is responsible for paying for it. Since that is the person we're reaching with this email, we provide a memory jogger to remind them that a) they're already customers and b) what Appointment Reminder does for their business, so that they can evaluate our offer in the most favorable light.
The second paragraph is the offer.
The third paragraph is just a link to the interface for upgrading. We intentionally force an extra click, so that they can see the calculation prior to actually OKing it. The actual interface (which is ugly and on-optimized, mostly because I'm lazy) can be seen here: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s423/sh/12298782-071d-4515-98a6-75841dd2e313/3aedfd28c008144f439ea3e3169649ef/deep/0/Manage-Settings---Appointment-Reminder.png
The final paragraph is simply meant to reduce perceived risk and/or confusion among customers not interested in the offer.