When a contact opts in to your email list, make sure your first impression is your best. This is your opportunity to bond with a new contact, tell them about your brand and engage them while their interest is fresh.
A study by Listrak showed a strong opt in series produces results. For the top 50 welcome campaigns they studied, the average conversion to customer rate was 24.9%. They found an average revenue of $1.07 per welcome message sent.
The welcome series is also a critical time to make sure that a new contact on your list becomes part of your engaged email segment by getting them to open and, even better, click into your message. Plus, this is an ideal opportunity to learn more about your contact for personalization, introduce your preferences center (if you use one), and set expectations for what emails you’ll be sending. All of these practices can go a long way toward creating better open, click and delivery metrics for your email program as a whole.
Crafting a great email welcome is an art. The right messaging will convey who your business is and what you offer and will establish ground rules for your relationship. There’s a methodology your prospects don’t see in the communication series, a series of best practices that help improve your chances of continuing to reach your new contact’s inbox, versus the junk folder.
What to include in your welcome series and how many messages to send is a decision each business should make based on the goals of your email program. Retailers most commonly use a three- to five-step series with a discount offer. But whether you put the discount in your first or last email in the series and what information you share during the sequence depends on your brand strategy. Business to business, the messaging may be focused around customer service, competitive advantage or a value proposition.
There is no single perfect formula for a welcome series to fit all companies. But there ARE best practices to leverage and emails that perform better than others. A properly optimized welcome campaign should be part of every email strategy.