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Did you know that your welcome sequence emails are super important to the overall success of your email marketing efforts?
There’s a couple of reasons for this.
- 74% of new subscribers expect to receive a welcome email. So if you’re not sending one, or not sending a *good* one, your subscribers are going to be left disappointed (and underutilised).
- Welcome emails often have open rates that exceed 80%. Read that again. 80% is a huge amount of your audience that’s viewing your content. Imagine if your social media content was shown to 80% of your followers! It would be amazing. (Unfortunately, Instagram’s reach typically ranges from 3-26%)
- Subscribers who receive welcome emails show 33% more long-term brand engagement compared to subscribers that don’t. This is another indicator of just how important welcome sequence emails are to the long-term results of your email marketing strategy.
Welcome email sequence vs. onboarding email sequence – are they the same?
Yes. These terms can be used interchangeably.
Although, some email marketers refer to an onboarding email sequence when they’re talking about emails sent post purchase (i.e. the onboarding or a new customer as opposed to nurturing a new lead).
How to create a good welcome email
First things first. A good welcome email is sent IMMEDIATELY.
As soon as someone gives you their email address, your welcome email should be hitting their inbox.
New leads are known to be most engaged within the first 48 hours of subscribing, so that first 48 hour period is a really important window of time for starting the right dialogue with your subscriber.
Welcome email design
Wanna know what the SINGLE most important piece of design advice I give small business owners when they’re creating a welcome email is?
Make it super duper easy for your subscribers to take the ONE action you really want them to take.
In reality, this is just as much about email marketing strategy as it is email marketing design.
It’s strategy because you need to know what that one action you really want your subscribers to take is. It could be following you on social media, heading to your website to read a blog or completing a survey that tells you a bit more about them (so you can better segment your mailing list).
But it’s also design because the way your email is laid out should be making it easy AF for your subscribers to take that one action.
So, how can you design your welcome email to achieve this? You could:
- Only include one call to action button in your email (make any other links hyperlinked text)
- Use multiple CTA buttons but make one more prominent (i.e. by using a more eye-catching colour and ensuring it is placed higher in your email)
It’s also suuuuper important that your welcome sequence emails set the right expectations. And unfortunately, this is one of the most common (and most detrimental) mistakes I see businesses make in their email marketing.
Your welcome sequence emails should let your subscribers know what kind of email content they can expect to receive from you and how frequently. This is so any emails that you’re planning to send to your subscribers in future don’t come as a nasty surprise.
Nothing is worse than subscribing to a mailing list only to have a business completely disrespect your wishes by bombarding you with emails you had no idea were coming.
So in your welcome sequence emails, let your subscribers know if you will be emailing them daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly or occasionally. Let them know what type of content will be in your emails.
Maybe it’s information about new product launches, educational content, sales offers or affiliate marketing. No matter what it is, be transparent about it.
And if you can, give your subscribers the ability to set their own communication preferences. Someone might be happy to receive weekly educational emails from you but not at all interested in affiliate marketing, so give them the ability to opt-in to one type of communication and opt-out of another.
Lastly, be careful of who you send your welcome email to. I know I said you should be sending your welcome sequence emails to your new subscribers as soon as possible but there is one important caveat to this rule.
You should only be sending your welcome sequence emails to subscribers that have confirmed their email address.
And when I say “confirmed”, this could be by placing a reCAPTCHA in your email sign up form or using a double opt-in process.
This is important because it stops you from accidentally sending emails to fake or miss-spelt email addresses. If either of these types of emails end up on your mailing list, your emails are far more likely to end up in all of your subscribers’ spam folders or not be delivered at all.
By only sending your welcome sequence emails (and any other emails) to verified email addresses you are minimising the risk of this happening to you.
Welcome eDM examples
If you’re in need of some welcome eDM examples, we’ve got you covered.
Here is a library full of our favourite welcome emails. You’re welcome! 😉
