The welcome email is the single most powerful event in which to grab your new prospect or customer by the collars and scream how great your brand is and how buying from you is going to make their life better.
Its one of those rare occasions when you are potentially speaking to 100% of your audience. Even just using standard messaging, expect opens of 40%+ and click thrus of 25%+ on email. Compare this with regular internal mailings where 20% open is the norm - and you already have 200% uplift. This is clearly a marketing moment not to be squandered, by following some simple rules. Guaranteeing high opens and clicks on welcome emails boils down to three things:
- Timing
- Message
- Audience
Email deliverability plays a key part here as you want to be sure as soon as someone opts-in to your newsletter, a follow-up email arrives in their inbox (every second counts!). Other potential real-time event based messaging include where timing is crucial to performance include site revisits, shopping cart abandonment, Birthdays, etc
2. Message
It is best to keep the initial email clear and welcoming. However make sure you dont waste the opportunity to truly engage the reader. For example, if you only use a welcome email to say hello, thanks, well be in touch again kind of thing, then you should march yourself to the marketing court for crimes against email marketing. Instead, make an unforgettable impact by rewarding the email recipient with some news, free advice, or better still, an exclusive offer (with an expiry date).
Another point worth considering is to guard against email creepiness. Just because you can, doesnt mean you should. Do not stalk your customers! For example, if upon learning that a site visitor has not bought that dress, dont email with a message saying we saw looking at that dress, but you didnt buy. Whats wrong? Instead, to achieve a more positive ROI use we noticed you browsing on our site today, but maybe you couldnt find what you were looking for. Can we help? Chat now or email us
3. Audience
Targeting the right people is essential, getting timing and targeting right with the wrong audience will eventually spell disaster. However, the problem may not be immediately obvious to the naked marketing eye. The problem is that stats do lie, because open rates and even click throughs can remain high when employing the right message at the right time. Ultimately however, targeting the wrong people means those window shoppers are unlikely to turn into a high enough buyers needed for campaign success.
If you are still keen to learn more about the power of welcome emails, check out great examples of customer welcome emails courtesy of those nice people at Smart Insights.
