One of the most under-used or valued emails that you can send out in your business is the welcome email.
A welcome email is typically a single email or a series of welcome emails. You’ll be sending these out to new email subscribers, as part of a marketing funnel, to new course sign-ups, customers who purchase a product or service, and a number of other situations.
Well-crafted welcome emails will help you to connect with your audience and build better relationships. It’s your opportunity to make a great first impression.
Almost 50% of online businesses are failing to even utilise a welcome email at all.
I want to help you write better welcome emails, so I’m putting together this series. It’s something that was highly requested by our Funnel Packs customers.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be creating a series of videos covering welcome emails. The first video is available for you below. In this video we’re going through:
- Why welcome emails are important
- Welcome email statistics
- Important benefits of welcome emails
- How many welcome emails should you use?
- What we’re doing wrong in Funnel Packs right now
- The plan for our new welcome email sequence
My goal with this video series is for you to be able to take notes, ideas and inspiration, so that you can create a fantastic welcome email sequence for your own audience.
Video Transcript
Hello and welcome to the first video in our Welcome Email series.
In this video series we’re going to be looking at how you can effectively use a welcome email or a sequence of welcome emails to build a better relationship with your new subscribers.
We’ll be using our own business, Funnel Packs, as an example during this series. So you’ll be able to follow along with the changes that we make and the impact that this has on our audience.
In this first video I’m going to talk to you about why welcome emails are important to your business, the benefits of welcome emails, what we’re currently doing with Funnel Packs and what our plan is as we move forwards.
Why do we care about welcome emails?
It’s a great question and they’re often something that people gloss over. Even I’m guilty of it this time, which I’ll talk to you about a little more shortly.
A welcome email is your first opportunity to build a relationship with your new subscriber. They’ve taken the first step to trust you by opting in to your newsletter, signing up for a lead magnet or another offer that you have.
The first email they receive from you will set the tone and standard for what it is to follow.
To put it simply, a welcome email is the very first step in the journey that the subscriber is going to have with your business.
You can write welcome emails for a newsletter opt-in, lead magnet, course sign-up, specific product purchases and so many other situations.
How do you want the first step of your relationship to be with your subscribers?
Only slightly more than half of the online businesses in the world today actually have a proper welcome email or welcome email sequence in place. For many of you listening as agency owners or digital business owners – this might be a place where you have nothing at all.
I’m going to help you change this.
Welcome email statistics
Here’s some welcome email statistics that will help you to understand how powerful they can be…
- Welcome emails have a 91.43% open rate (hive.co)
- Welcome emails have on average 4x the open rate and 5x the click-through rate of a standard email marketing campaign (InboxArmy)
- Welcome email read rates are 42% higher than the average email (Campaign Monitor)
- Welcome emails on average generate up to 320% more revenue per email than other promotional emails (Invesp)
- 74% of consumers expect a welcome email as soon as they subscribe (WordStream)
- New leads are most engaged within 48 hours of subscribing (VerticalResponse)
Welcome email benefits
There are many benefits to sending out great welcome emails. Here’s a few of my favourites:
- Introduce your new leads to your business – This is fairly self explanatory but as I mentioned before you have an opportunity to explain a little more about what you offer here.
- Share your story – Everyone has a story. Tell people about your brand, tell them about you! Allow subscribers to connect and engage with who you are.
- Set expectations – Your welcome email allows you to set the expectations of what will be coming next. Let your subscribers know when and how you will be emailing them.
- Deliver value – This is really important. Your welcome emails are not just a place to do a massive sales pitch. When you deliver value to your new subscribers, you’re showing them that your emails are worth reading and that you are an expert who wants to help them. You can still pitch… but don’t be the person who paddles in on their douche canoe.
- Reinforce benefits – Take the time to reinforce the benefits of your product or service. You’re solving problems that your new subscriber has, let them know how and why.
- Segment your subscribers – In an ideal world you don’t ever want to be sending the same emails out to your entire list all the time, especially if you offer multiple products or services. Taking the time to segment your subscribers can make a big difference to the results that you’ll get in the future.
- Share case studies – Again this should be fairly self explanatory. Share case studies and results that your customers have achieved when using your products or services.
- Make a great first impression – This single line alone is probably the most important benefit of them all. You have one chance to make a great first impression with your new subscribers. Human beings are fickle and if you’re not memorable, you can’t blame a new subscriber for forgetting all about you.
How many emails should you have in your welcome email sequence?
Some people are happy with one email. That’s okay and is certainly better than nothing, but it’s not at all ideal.
As a minimum, I’d suggest considering between 3 and 5 emails. This will give you an opportunity to properly welcome your subscribers, share your story and set expectations. You can also include a pitch for your products or services.
There’s not really an upper limit to the number of emails that you can send out in a welcome sequence either.
One of the longest welcome email sequences that I ever wrote for a customer was 24 emails in length. This particular sequence was a welcome email for customers who purchased a specific product from their E-Commerce store.
The product was specialised and fairly complex in nature. Taking the time to craft an excellent welcome series for the product provided them with more sales, repeat purchases and most importantly – halved their support emails and telephone calls.
You should write as many welcome emails as it takes for you to effectively engage your new subscriber and help them towards the desired action that you want them to take. Test and optimise this over time. Your email software will allow you to track open and click-through rates.
Our current welcome email
I mentioned earlier that I had been guilty of glossing over a welcome email for our business.
When we launched Funnel Packs in April 2019, I set up a quick welcome email for our newsletter subscribers. I’ll show it to you in just a moment.
Being honest, it’s not a great email and it doesn’t make a great first impression for the person receiving it.
The email was set up as part of our launch strategy, but I had every intention to go back in and create a far more engaging welcome email sequence.
Unfortunately as we’re just a team of 2, I never had the time to get back around to updating the email. We’ve been so busy creating products for our customers that there just wasn’t the time.
It’s an easy mistake to make when you’re running a digital agency or online business. You are busy serving your customers and your audience. This will often mean that your own website or marketing gets left behind a little.
I know there are at least a few people nodding along with me right now.
Okay, time for me to face the music and show you the email…
This is a screenshot from our ConvertKit account of the welcome email that we send out after someone signs up for our newsletter.
There’s a little personalisation in the subject line…
[I read out the email here]
As you can see from the email, it’s a pretty basic message. We’re just letting people know when we send out our regular weekly emails, on a Friday. We also give our new subscribers an easy way to contact us.
Other than that though, we’re missing out on every single one of the benefits that I showed you earlier in this video.
Let’s write a new email sequence
It’s time for us to write a new email sequence for our newsletter subscribers.
We’ll use this specifically for newsletter opt-ins from our website, but it can easily be adapted to suit other purposes as well.
I asked the customers in our Facebook group if they’d like to follow along for the ride and there was an overwhelming response of “yes” – so that’s why this video exists and I’m talking to you now.
You’ll be following along as we create the new email sequence. I’ll show you exactly what we’re doing and why.
My goal is for you to be able to take notes, ideas and inspiration from this so that you can create a fantastic welcome email sequence for your own audience.
Let’s take a look at the planned sequence…
The new email sequence
This is an overview of the new welcome email sequence that a subscriber will receive after they’ve signed up for our newsletter.
It is a work in progress as I record this video, so we may find that in a future video I’ve carried out a few tweaks to improve the sequence.
Before we look at any of the emails – one of the most important things I can add here is that any new subscriber who opts in will not receive additional marketing emails during the welcome sequence.
Let’s look at the emails…
- First up we have the Welcome and Intro to Funnel Packs – This will be where we thank the subscriber for opting in and set some initial expectations as to what will be coming next. We’ll also talk briefly about Funnel Packs.
- About Matt and Mel – Here we’ll go into our personal stories and share some of our personalities with our new subscribers. It’s really important to both Mel and I that we build genuine and awesome relationships with people.
- Saving Time – This is one of the core principles of why we created Funnel Packs. So we’ll be talking about why saving time matters, and what an agency owner could do with that time they’ve saved.
- Case Study – We’ll introduce a case study or two from our customers here.
- Pitch – The first pitch in the sequence. I’m imagining that this will be a round-up of our most popular Funnel Packs and why they might benefit the subscriber.
- Value Email – This will be an email that contains nothing but value. A tip or idea that someone could implement in their business right away.
- Soft Pitch – This is a gentler pitch than the previous pitch email. We could focus on some of the major benefits that our customers have found when implementing Funnel Packs, as an example.
- Value Email – Two more value emails will follow. Again, no pitching here – just pure value.
- Pitch – This will be a pitch with more urgency, maybe even with a special offer if someone takes action immediately at that point.
- Survey / Segmentation – At this point, I want to get a little more information from the subscriber. Ideally I’d like to know what the most important service or services are that they offer to their customers. By knowing this, I can then send them emails that are personalised and more relevant. I could even move this segmentation step to be, a lot earlier in the email sequence.
After the last email has been sent out, we’ll then move the new subscriber onto our main newsletter list or to a shadow newsletter.
There’s a little difference between those two elements, so I’ll explain that quickly.
With a normal email newsletter, I’d be writing out an email every week on a Friday. Almost all of the emails I send out are story based, with the intention of delivering value and building better relationships with our audience.
A shadow newsletter would follow the same principles, but it’s something that I’ve written in advance. It gives me a great opportunity to use emails that I’ve written previously and to show them to new subscribers. So instead of writing to them every week, I could set up my shadow newsletter to deliver them an email that I’ve already written each week.
Pretty cool right?
Summary and up next
Alright so this has been a walkthrough on the benefits of creating a great welcome email. I’ve shown you a little of my shame with the pretty average welcome email that we have in place right now.
I’ve also shared with you the plan for our new welcome email sequence.
In the next video we’re going to start writing our new welcome emails. I look forward to seeing you there!
Thanks for joining me for this video, have a great day ahead! You’re awesome, take care.
