• Home
• Automated Campaigns
• Customizing Your Campaigns

When we say customization, you think Dear {{ user.first_name }}. But that would barely scratch the surface. The most powerful customization means tailoring your campaigns to the user's exact role, use case, or situation.

In this guide, you'll learn to customize your email campaigns for multiple scenarios. We'll talk about three methods, and see when each one works best.

When do you need customization?

• Different roles. Admins, managers or editors may need to learn different things to become successful in your product.
• Different billing plans. Users on different plans may require a different approach to their onboarding and lifecycle emails. You can promote hands-on help to premium users, while focusing on DIY options for other plans.
• Different industries. If your product targets 2-3 different verticals, it's powerful to use domain-specific language in your campaigns.
• Different use cases. If your product can do multiple things, it helps to know what goal your user is trying to achieve. You can then help them do exactly that during their onboarding.

Prerequisite: organize your data

Your customer data needs to reliably reflect those use cases you're customizing for. This means a dedicated property with consistent values.

For example:

• industry = hotels, restaurants, beauty_salons
• use_case = photo, video
• role = admin, manager, editor, viewer
• billing_plan = basic, professional

You'd typically get this data during the signup process by asking the user directly what they're planning to do, or what industry their company belongs to.

Ideally, you want to make the values mutually exclusive, meaning that each user only has one value in these fields. This way, you can clearly direct them into one path.

Method 1. Different campaigns

If your narrative needs to be absolutely different, the best way is to have multiple campaigns filtered by use case.

For example, you run a B2B SaaS that serves hotels and restaurants. You will have two onboarding campaigns:

• Onboarding: Hotels. Trigger when user joins segment Trials and industry = hotels
• Onboarding: Restaurants. Trigger when user joins segment Trials and industry = restaurants

This method provides complete clarity and control over different campaigns.

However, if these campaigns are too similar, you'll find yourself copying and pasting a lot. When updating campaigns, you'll find yourself implementing the same change in different campaigns. It can get unproductive.

That's a sign that you should be using one campaign, which is described in our next method.

Method 2. Different emails inside one campaign

This method works best if the core of your campaign remains the same, and you only need to customize certain emails.

For example, your product has two plans: Basic and Professional. All users need to learn the same things, but you want to promote hands-on help to your Professional users, and share the DIY guide with your Basic users.

Here's how your user onboarding campaign can look like. Most emails are sent to everyone, but some of them are split based on the use case:

1. Welcome to our product
2. Book a call with our tech team — only send if billing_plan = professional
3. Here's your DIY guide — only send if billing_plan = basic
4. Inspiring case study
5. Top tips on being great at X
6. Another inspiring case study

This method helps you avoid duplicate content, as you only customize a few individual emails. Inside those emails, you have full control over the subject line and the content.

Method 3. Different Liquid blocks inside one email

Sometimes, even separate emails would be an overkill. You merely want to customize parts of one email. For that, Liquid tags work magic.

With multiple use cases, we recommend using the case/when condition. It allows you to customize an email fragment based on a variety of values.

In the following example, we personalize the product benefit based on the user's occupation (marketer, designer, or photographer), and show a generic benefit to everybody else:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
{% case user.occupation %}
  {% when 'marketer' %}
     As a marketer, you can use Sparkle to craft eye-catching visuals for your ads and email campaigns.
  {% when 'designer' %}
     As a designer, you can use Sparkle to polish images for your website projects.
  {% when 'photographer' %}
     As a photographer, you can save hundreds of working hours with Sparkle’s batch editing and processing.
  {% else %}
     Sparkle is an all-in-one solution to any image editing needs in your business.
{% endcase %}

Depending on your situation, you can also use other tags like if/else or unless. For more details, see our guide on using Liquid.

This method helps you avoid duplicate emails and extra work.

The drawback is that you're only customizing the message body. Technically, you can use Liquid in the subject line field as well, but it's a bit fiddly to implement case/when there.

Conclusion: there's no right or wrong way

Hope these three methods help you achieve the desired results for your own SaaS business. There's no right or wrong way, as soon as your users receive the most relevant message at the right time.

Check out these guides on SaaS email automation:

• How to Trigger a Behavior-based Email Campaign
• One Email List, Multiple Products
• Email Marketing for B2C SaaS
• Email Marketing for "Unpopular" SaaS Pricing Models

If you need help with your specific case, we're always happy to help with a free strategy call. No strings attached.