The Per-Seat Growth Flywheel

Per-seat pricing creates the most elegant growth flywheel in SaaS: users invite teammates, teammates become seats, seats become revenue. Email is what keeps this flywheel spinning. The right invite prompt at the right moment turns one user into a team. The right onboarding turns a new seat into an active user. The right expansion email turns an active team into a growing account.

The companies that nail per-seat email marketing obsess over two metrics: invite rate (how often users invite others) and seat activation rate (how quickly new seats become active). Everything else flows from these two numbers.

Admin vs User Communication

Per-seat SaaS has a natural split in communication targets. Admins care about billing, seat management, usage analytics, and team health. Individual users care about onboarding, feature discovery, and collaboration. Sending billing information to regular users is noise. Sending feature tips to admins is often irrelevant.

The best approach is to tag contacts by role and build separate communication tracks. Admins get seat utilization reports, expansion prompts, and billing communications. Users get onboarding, feature tips, and collaboration prompts. Both benefit from product updates, but even those can be personalized by role.

The Unused Seat Problem

Unused seats are the silent killer of per-seat SaaS. An admin paying for 10 seats where only 4 are active is slowly building resentment toward your product. They might not say anything for months, but when renewal comes, they either downgrade or churn entirely.

Proactive communication about unused seats is uncomfortable but necessary. An email saying "You have 6 unused seats, here is how to activate them" is much better than silence followed by a surprise downgrade. And if seats stay unused despite your help, proactively suggesting a smaller plan builds the kind of trust that leads to expansion later when their team actually grows.