When SaaS teams hit a wall, email is often the first scapegoat.
- Trial-to-paid conversions stuck? Must be the onboarding emails.
- Churn too high? Must be the retention sequence.
- Feature launches flop? Must be the announcement copy.
But here’s what I’ve learned working with dozens of SaaS companies:
Your emails are a reflection of your business decisions.
They're just a mirror.
They reflect the quality of your SaaS decisions at you.
- Pricing model → If your tiers are confusing or misaligned with value, no email sequence will magically drive upgrades.
- Activation flow → If it takes 12 steps to set up an account, your onboarding emails will look like a never-ending chore list.
- Product strategy → If you’re building features to compete instead of solving real problems, your launch emails will feel irrelevant.
- Retention decisions → If you're not figuring out why users are churning, your lifecycle emails won’t know how to help them.
- Positioning → If your ICP is fuzzy, your messaging will whiplash between audiences, and your emails will sound just as scattered.
I’ve seen teams spend weeks rewriting email copy when the real issue was never the email.
It was the decision underneath it.
They were just too overwhelmed to notice.
Or too scared to say it out loud (because who wants to tell the CEO that the problem isn't our emails, it's your positioning.)
So, if your emails are well-written, well-designed, and well-planned, and you can't figure out why you can't lift conversions...
Then the problem may not be your emails.
The problem is most likely the bad business decisions made by the C-Suite.
(Hey, someone had to say it!)
So the next time you struggle with email conversions, ask yourself:
What business decision is this email reflecting?
— Samar