One of the most important emails you’ll ever send out is your welcome email.
And, if we’re being completely honest, it’s probably the email you’ve invested the least amount of time into. But, judging by the amount of boring, uninspired, robotic welcome emails I’ve received, you’re not alone.
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A lot of businesses fail to take advantage of the biggest opportunity they’ll ever have to engage with their subscriber. If you think that you’ll wow them later with your newsletters and upcoming promotions but that it’s perfectly okay to bore them now with a soulless form letter…
New subscribers are the most engaged with a brand within the first 48 hours of signing up. You can’t afford to squander that opportunity with bland, computer generated copy.
Did you know that welcome emails generate 320% more revenue than other emails? Mind blowing, but true. So, if you’re not selling in your welcome email, or at least routing your new subscribers back to your website, what are you doing? Are you only acknowledging that they’ve signed up?
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It’s a good thing you stopped by today. We’re going to discuss exactly how to create a welcome email that rocks the socks off of your subscribers and confirms that they made the right choice in signing up.
Let’s do this!
Automate Your Email Process
First things first, you need a quality email service provider, or ESP. This is different from an email provider, like Gmail, that allows you to send personal or business emails from your inbox.
When you’re sending newsletters and other emails, you’ll need to set up an account with a service that can help you do just that. Otherwise, if you try to send out newsletters from your personal inbox, you can get in trouble for not following CAN-SPAM rules and penalized up to $16,000 per offence.
That’s why signing up for a free account with MailChimp is a great alternative. MailChimp is one of our favorite email service providers because it’s so darn easy to use. But, of course, there are a lot of other good ones, including ConvertKit.
Segment Your Subscribers Right Out of the Gate
Segmenting is, without a doubt, the best gift you can give yourself and your subscribers. You’ll be able to deliver targeted content to the right audience, meaning that they’re more likely to open and click through to your link.
So, the best way to do this (and yes, it will require some work on your end) is to slightly tweak your welcome message based on how the subscriber signed up.
If you’re on top of your email marketing game, you’ll have sign ups galore. Some people will sign up under a general link, others will sign up to receive a content upgrade, and some will sign up after joining your webinar.
My point is, the people on your list probably have different reasons for signing up, so you need to acknowledge that. Give them a slightly different message and a slightly different value.
Here’s an example of how that would work out:
Now, you have three distinct segments that you can break down into further segments (but I’m not going to give you a headache illustrating that point). Now, you can market differently to these three segments.
For example, group 3 may be primed to get exclusive, discounted access to your premium workshop that you’ve teased in your free webinar. Groups 1 and 2 may not be ready for that, so you may need to introduce them to the topic by sending an email, inviting them to a replay of your webinar. Whoever attends that webinar gets a follow up email about your premium workshop.
Okay, I’m veering into the headache category, but you see how this works.
It may sound like a lot of trouble, but keep in mind that the ROI for email marketing is an astounding 3,800%. For every $1 you spend in email marketing, you’ll get $38 back. Pair that with the fact that welcome emails generate more money than other types of emails, and I think you can take some ibuprofen and make it happen.
Decide What Type of Welcome Email to Send
You have two choices: You can send a single email or a series of emails as your welcome campaign.
Which one you choose depends on the size of your business, and what you’d like to accomplish.
However, I think there’s a good argument for a series of emails. It gets people accustomed to seeing your emails and (hopefully) opening them.
If you do a series of welcome emails, consider making it a mini course or tutorial that ultimately leads to purchasing from you.
Set Preferences
As we discussed earlier, your welcome email can be an opportunity to segment your subscribers.
Along with segmenting based on how they sign up for your list, you can ask them for more information. This is known as “progressive profiling”.
Progressive profiling helps you get a closer look at your subscribers. It’s necessary because, without it, you don’t know much about your subscribers. Your opt-in form is, by design, minimal. If you’re doing it right, you only get a subscriber’s email address and name (if that) on the initial opt-in. That’s because the less you ask, the greater your chance of getting them to actually sign-up. No one wants to tell you their blood type on your email opt-in.
With progressive profiling, you can start filling in the fine details. On your welcome email, ask for other profile information, such as:
This way, your subscribers will start segmenting themselves.
Send in Real Time
Do me, you and your audience a favor and send out your welcome emails in real time. Don’t wait and batch your welcome emails to send out at 5pm the next day or some meaningless time like that.
You’ve got seconds (okay, maybe a few minutes max) to make an impression on your subscribers. Remember, they’re most engaged with your brand immediately after signing up. Don’t let them forget about you. By sending out your email in real time as a direct response to a sign up, you’ll increase your transaction rate by 10.
Send Them Back to Your Site Immediately
Calls to action and welcome emails go hand in hand. Have a plan in place for what you want your new subscribers to do next. Here are some ideas:
Attach an expiration date to your promo code to maximize on their motivation to shop now.
Link to a landing page that highlights your best content.
Tell the story of your brand. Link to a video or share a behind the scenes collage of photos.
Start building a community on your social platforms, especially if you’re seeing considerable lift there.
If you find that a lot of your emails are sent to the spam folder, be proactive. Create a mini tutorial that shows your new subscribers how to add your email to the safe list.
You can get really sophisticated and send out different CTAs depending on the segment/ sign up.
Final Thoughts
Are you pumped and ready to create (or revamp) your welcome email? Don’t forget to download our bonus content to this post.