The PLG Email Playbook

Product-led growth flips the traditional SaaS funnel. Instead of marketing to leads, demoing to prospects, and closing deals, you let users sign up, try the product, and upgrade themselves. Email's job in this model is not to sell. It is to remove friction.

The best PLG email programs are invisible to the user. They show up at exactly the right moment: when setup stalls, when a feature goes undiscovered, when usage hits a limit. They feel helpful, not promotional. And they are entirely driven by what the user did (or did not do) in the product.

If you are still sending the same onboarding drip to every new signup regardless of their behavior, you are leaving a lot of activation and conversion on the table.

Activation Emails That Actually Move the Needle

The single most impactful email you will ever send as a PLG company is the one that gets a new signup to complete their first key action. Not a feature tour. Not a "welcome to the platform" essay. Just one clear action that correlates with long-term retention.

Figure out what your activation event is (first project created, first integration connected, first team member invited), then build a tight sequence around getting users there. Measure success by activation rate, not open rate.

Self-Serve Conversion Without Being Pushy

The biggest mistake PLG companies make with upgrade emails is sending them on a schedule instead of based on behavior. A user who signed up yesterday and has not set anything up does not need an upgrade email on day 7. A user who just hit their storage limit for the third time this week absolutely does.

Event-triggered upgrade emails convert at multiples of time-based ones. Tools like Sequenzy with native Stripe integration make this straightforward: when usage triggers a billing event, the corresponding email fires automatically.