Welcome Emails

Proven Tactics for Engaging and Successful Welcome Emails

Welcome emails are a great way to establish trust, drive engagement, and extend the customer lifecycle. Learn how to use them to your advantage!
Article Outline

Welcome emails are among the most important marketers ever send. These targets have moved from prospect to customer, so welcome emails frame an entirely new conversation and set the stage for an entirely new conversation. Still, many marketers don’t even bother to send these game-changing emails.

As marketers, we’re always scratching our heads trying to figure out how we can drive engagement to the next level. Sometimes, this can feel like a daunting and complicated task. But sending welcome messages to new customers is the sort of low hanging fruit that provides a major return with minimal effort.

So, if you are going to set one goal this quarter to improve your email engagement, you should strongly consider planning and executing engaging welcome emails.

Why Are Welcome Emails So Important?

First, welcome emails are opened at a much higher rate than typical marketing messages. On average, welcome emails have a 50% open rate, which means recipients are over 75% more likely to open these messages than other marketing emails. So, with such a high likelihood of quality engagement, you want to make a great first impression with the content of your welcome emails.  

If the increased open and click rates of welcome messages aren’t enough to convince you of their importance, consider how these emails can help you establish a strong foothold with your new customers. Done right, welcome emails can help you set expectations, begin the onboarding process, and build more trust in your brand, products, and services.

Modern consumers expect to be welcomed after a purchase, subscription, or download – even if that’s just to confirm that their purchase or sign-up was successful. In a basic sense, it’s just rude to not welcome new customers when they visit your business. If you owned a department store, would you want your employees to greet the customers when they walked in or ignore them? Exactly. But this goes beyond common courtesy; not sending a welcome message comes off as uncaring, unprofessional, and untrustworthy. It’s like purchasing a product from a store – even if you’re not planning to return the item, you still want a receipt.

So, the net effect of a well-crafted welcome email is not only that the message itself is over 75% likely to be opened than other messages but that users who receive a welcome email will show more engagement with your future marketing emails because you’ve made an effort to cement the relationship. In fact, users who receive a welcome email are 33% more likely to continue engaging with your brand.

What is Email Deliverability and Why Should You Care?

Welcome Emails Can Fuel Lasting and Productive Customer Relationships

Adhering to the following welcome email best practices can establish trust, strengthen brand affinity, and increase the likelihood of additional purchases and renewals.

  1. Send Welcome Messages Immediately: Customers are much less likely to open a welcome email that isn’t received within the first hour of their purchase, subscription, or download, so you want to ensure that these messages fire quickly. Act-On’s Event-Triggered Email Automation empowers marketers to easily deliver timely welcome emails. 
  2. Say “Thank You“: This might feel like a no-brainer, but you need to thank your new customers and prospects with every welcome email. Better yet, say so in the subject line to make the purpose of the email clear. For example, “Thank you for signing up with Act-On” or “Welcome to Act-On!”
  3. Set Expectations: Successful email marketing is based on establishing trust and setting reasonable expectations. The best way to do this is with your welcome email. Let your customers and subscribers know how often you will be emailing, the types of emails they will be receiving, and how they can unsubscribe or adjust their subscription settings.  
  4. Keep It Simple (but include a call-to-action): Remember, welcome emails are intended to thank your new customers or subscribers and embrace them as the newest members of your brand’s community. So, while you want to keep it simple, you can also include additional links that introduce relevant products, services, and content.
  5. Send More Than One Welcome Email: You don’t want to stuff your welcome email (or any email, for that matter) with too much content. Doing so can overwhelm the recipient, leading to lower click-through rates. If you need more than one email to introduce your brand and engage with your new subscriber, you can use Act-On’s Automated Email Programs to build a Welcome and Onboarding campaigns.

Orchestrate the Customer Lifecycle With Act-On Automated Email Programs

The Act-On growth marketing automation platform has everything you need to plan, create, execute, and measure welcome email programs – and much more. To learn more about our solution, please click here to schedule a free, no-pressure demo.

Or, if you’d like to learn more about email marketing, deliverability, and onboarding, please download this eBook!

What is Email Deliverability and Why Should You Care?

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