Email marketing is a tried-and-true powerhouse for driving sales and building lasting customer relationships, but it can be time consuming for busy marketers and small business owners. Automated campaigns can help to take some of the most repetitive communication weight off your shoulders. This guide will walk you through a few strategies for maximizing your welcome email series, as well as your overall effectiveness.

The Importance of a Warm Welcome

A helpful, friendly welcome email series ensures that you are always making a good first impression with your newest subscribers, and it sets the stage for a lasting relationship. It’s also your best opportunity to grab your customers’ attention. According to LXA/MarTechAlliance, “the average open rate for welcome emails is 50%-86% more effective than email newsletters.¹“

Whether you need to build your brand awareness, encourage first-time purchases, or educate your subscribers, it’s a moment you won’t want to waste. Make the most of it by clarifying your goals before you dive right in. What exactly do you want your welcome series to achieve? What are your overall marketing and business objectives? Clearly defining your benchmarks, like driving a 10% increase in first-time purchases for example, helps you tailor content that will promote meaningful engagement from the start.

Designing Your Welcome Series

A great welcome starts with a smart sign up process. The simpler your sign up form, the more sign ups you’ll get, it’s true. However, if you include a brief checklist of interests to choose from at sign up, your recipients can receive tailored content that feels more relevant and helpful to them. Sign ups can also give you useful demographic information. Your business and goals will help you determine which segmentation categories are the most relevant to capture. Need help with setting your marketing goals? Check out our blog post on 3 helpful approaches you can try.

Once you’ve got your purpose and your sign up process established, you’ll need to decide how many emails you’ll send and what each email will focus on. The exact length of your welcome series will vary depending on your business or organization, your goals, and the length of your sales cycle.

If you’re a small farm that sells eggs and milk, a short 3-email series to thank your new subscribers, introduce your business and your products, and to push for your desired behavior (buy a product, visit the farm, etc.), will be enough for a great start. However, if your product is extremely technical, expensive, custom, and has a multi-year sales cycle, you’ll need a longer series, in the 6-8 email range, to properly introduce your organization, yourself, and your value proposition.

The best cadence for these emails will vary from organization to organization and even from segment to segment, but should feel natural and not overwhelm your recipient. Use feedback from engagement data, such as open and click-through rates, to adjust the timing and frequency. Shortening or lengthening your series can be based on how well recipients are responding.

Sample Welcome Series Framework

A typical welcome email series framework might look something like this:

Email 1: Greeting and Gratitude
Thank the subscriber for joining, briefly introduce your brand, offer an incentive, if applicable. This should be triggered to send directly following your new subscriber signs up and personalized. (If you use Mailchimp, for example, you’ll select “Create Automation” → “Welcome Series” and define the starting trigger as “when someone subscribes.” In Klaviyo, you can build a flow where the series starts as soon as a subscriber is added to a specific list or segment.)

Email 2: Share a Story
Highlight key benefits or what makes your brand unique, introduce your top products or services, and tease a social proof for Email 3. This can be sent 1-2 days after Email 1.

Email 3: Social Proof
Showcase a review, testimonial or case study, invite the subscriber to follow you on social media, and tease educational content. Send this 3-4 days after Email 2.

Email 4: Educational Content
Offer a value-added tutorial, how-to-guide, or blog post, ideally also illustrating how your org solves a problem. If you’ve used your signup form to ask subscribers what type of content they’re interested in, this can help you better segment your emails. Tease a special, limited time offer coming soon. Send this 4-5 days after Email 3.

Email 5: Call to Action
Nudge your new subscriber to buy or whatever action you need them to take and share a limited-time offer. This one goes out 5-7 days after Email 4.

Engaging Content and Storytelling Techniques

Once you have your outline, it’s time to dive into the writing process. Grab your favorite mechanical keyboard and settle down by the digital fireside to channel your inner turn-of-the-century serial magazine writer skills. As our attentive Reader, you’ll notice the outline above emphasized teasing the next email throughout your welcome series. Think of each email as a chapter in an ongoing story. While you won’t be crafting literal cliffhangers, the goal remains the same: keep your audience eager for the next message.

Don’t be like the evil villain, spoiling the mystery by spilling everything in one lengthy diatribe to a poor, unsuspecting audience. By hinting at upcoming solutions, sharing testimonials and social proof, and holding back key content for future emails, you build anticipation and curiosity. Your subject lines should reflect that same intrigue, too, encouraging subscribers to open and engage with each email.

Testing, Optimization, and Additional Reading

After you’ve written your best series of tantalizing, intriguing emails, you’ll want to test them for mobile responsiveness, broken links, and typos first. Then check the automation to ensure triggers are working correctly and each subsequent email sends at the appropriate interval. Once you’re happy with your results, you can activate the automation and start monitoring your open rates, click-through-rates and conversions to see how your emails perform. If certain emails have lower engagement, you can A/B test your subject lines, email designs, content or timing to improve performance.

For small business and nonprofit marketers eager to elevate their messaging and looking for a good e-book to curl up with, check out Donald Miller’s Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen. Positioning your customers as the heroes and your brand as their guide, this book can help you learn more about how to craft compelling messages that resonate, especially in your welcome emails.

When you weave storytelling together with social proof and share genuinely useful content, you can keep your new subscribers engaged while guiding them toward the actions you want them to take. Regular testing and tracking will help you fine-tune your approach along the way.

Make it a great week online, everyone!