Email marketing is a powerful tool that can distinguish your company and help you build trust and authority with customers.
One of the most common questions we get is “How do I write a good welcome email?” We have put together a list of some best practices for writing welcome emails and some examples of welcome emails that have worked well for us.
Keep in mind that when you write a welcome email, you set the tone for the whole relationship that you build with your subscribers and it’s the first opportunity you have been given by your subscriber to communicate with them and that is your opportunity to make a great first impression.
If you write an ordinary one, you’ll only grow a modest list. However, if you put some creative energy into it, you’ll keep your readers coming back for more and you will increase customer retention.
We all want our email list to grow, isn’t it? Let’s start by sending a welcome message as soon as possible. Your new subscribers are at their most receptive moment and they are engaged with your brand, so contact them fast and send them something exciting!
Welcoming new subscribers takes time but it’s worth the effort when you see those engagement rates go up immediately afterwards.
You can automatically create welcome emails using our email marketing automation feature, so each new subscriber will receive their email on their first day- without fail or error in any way shape form whatsoever.
About 80% of newsletters nowadays send a welcome message to their subscribers and this is associated with an increased opening and read rate compared to those who did not send anything at all.
Welcome emails work best when they’re clearly identified and add something interesting to grab attention. With inboxes getting more crowded, you want your welcome email to stand out in inboxes getting more crowded by the day. You could follow what many marketers use, a simple “Welcome to {brand name}” right up front as their subject line!
If you noticed, in MailMatic’s signup forms we have 2 separate fields for the first and last name. Although you could set the system differently, if you customize the form you should clearly identify the fields and avoid clustering the whole name in a single field.
Names are the most important part of our identity. When someone remembers our name after meeting us, we feel respected and important. Our “welcome email” is just that: our first meeting with our subscribers so something in the tone of “Hello {first_name} and thank you for joining us!” will go a long way on showing them respect, gratitude and setting the first step of a fruitful rapport.
Instead of making new subscribers wait for your next newsletter, you could use the welcome email to introduce them with some of your best content. For instance if you’re running a SaaS (Software as Services) business, you might want to link in your welcome email an easy step-by-step guide so that your subscribers can start using your service right away!
If, instead, you are running an ecommerce business, don’t be shy and include products or services in their welcome email. The goal for an eCommerce company may be simply enough getting subscribers to make a purchase, so don’t hide what you have!
One of the best ways to build your email list is through referrals. Word of mouth is the most powerful form of promotion and you should definitely leverage it to build your list.
For example, when someone we know recommends something they’re more likely than not to act on the referral which means that recommendation might carry some weight with our audience as well!
Even Facebook, Linkedin and Google still use this referral request strategy to promote their services in exchange for sending customers your contacts’ names and email addresses!
Done properly, this method works especially well; however there are things necessary such as providing incentive programs so subscribers remain engaged long enough until results start showing
Welcome emails are one of the best ways to get new subscribers hooked on your brand. If you grab the opportunity to present your subscribers with a time-sensitive offer, a discount code, a coupon or a gift offer for them, considering that usually the first email has a very high read rate, this could turn in increased sales.
Your focus has to be always on keeping high your deliverability rate and reaching your subscribers’ inbox. You should always add – and more importantly this should be in your welcome email – a request to your users to whitelist your email address so that by being onto their “safe list” you can avoid being sent to spam by mistake. Here’s what you might want to add to your welcome email to ask your users to do that :
“To ensure delivery to your inbox, please add {email_address} to your address book/contact list.”
It might seem counterintuitive but some subscribers might want to unsubscribe right away when they receive your welcome email. So, do not forget to add a link for them to unsubscribe on each email you send them – including your welcome email.
Besides the fact that this is a legal requirement (CAN-SPAM, GDPR, PDPA), respecting users’ preferences is crucial and will avoid your welcome email going to spam and achieve the opposite result of what you hoped for.
In MailMatic, our email templates all come with an unsubscribe link and it is only a drag and drop adding it to your welcome mail.
MailMatic is an energetic start-up set to reinvent and democratize email marketing as a whole. With the vision to make email marketing automation tools affordable, available and easy to use so that any business can leverage its platform to grow their business, MailMatic offers the most affordable rates on the market and the most generous lifetime FREE tier.
Consider signing up and giving MailMatic a try if you want to leverage email as your marketing tool to connect to your clients.
Founder and Technologist at MailMatic – Nello is a technologist and founder with over 40 years of experience in the information technology industry. He has co-founded or founded several startups. His areas of expertise include software engineering, product management, customer acquisition & retention strategies, marketing analytics and digital media distribution.
