Improve Your Signup: Welcome Email – Part 3

In the final part of this series, we’ll take a look at the welcome email, or a message that comes at the end of the signup confirmation process.

Welcome emails are an automated email type that are triggered to send after someone confirms they’d like to be signed up to your list. In MailPoet, these can be set up to be sent immediately after sign up, or after a set period of time. The best bit about them is that you only need to set them up once, and then they’ll automatically send when someone joins your list!

If you’ve just arrived here and haven’t read the rest of our signup confirmation series, you should have a read of Part 1 –  Improve Your Signup Confirmation Email and Part 2 – Improve Your Confirmation Landing Page first.

Why have a welcome email?

Back in Part 1, we talked about how the signup confirmation email should be kept barebones in order to get people to activate their subscription. Whilst this tactic is definitely the right approach for your confirmation email, you might be thinking that it was a missed opportunity to show your nearly new subscribers what your business is about.

But that’s where a welcome email comes in.

The welcome email is an email that is sent after the user confirms their subscription. Think of it as a brief “getting to know you” message. It’s the perfect opportunity to welcome your new subscriber to your mailing list with some useful content and links.

Let’s take a look at a snippet of the MailPoet newsletter welcome email. You can see the full version here.

What should I include in my welcome email?

As you can see from our own example above, we’ve already shared one top tip for content you should include in your welcome emails – a message that asks the reader to add your email to their primary inbox, or VIP list. 

Asking your readers to do this from the outset will mean you’re less likely to run into any email deliverability issues further down the line. You’ve worked hard to get people to sign up to your mailing list and create your newsletters, so you’re going to want to make sure they do actually receive them!

Here’s the copy we used in our own welcome email, which you’re free to customize and reuse as you please.

To make sure our monthly newsletter hits your inbox, we recommend following these quick steps:

Gmail users—move us to your primary inbox

On your phone? Hit the 3 dots at top right corner, click “Move to” then “Primary”

On desktop? Back out of this email then drag and drop this email into the “Primary” tab near the top left of your screen

Apple mail users—tap on our email address at the top of this email (next to “From:” on mobile) and click “Add to VIPs”

For everyone else—follow these instructions.

But what else should you include?

First up, it’s a good idea to remind your subscribers what they signed up for. Reiterate how often they can expect your emails, and what they’re likely to include (e.g. unique tips, a roundup of the best blog posts, exclusive discounts, etc). Set some expectations, and exceed them!

You can then use the rest of your email to encourage your subscribers to engage with your brand by highlighting your products, services, or content.

We’ve included a clear call-to-action encouraging our new subscribers to try out MailPoet for free. This is a pretty enticing offer for readers who haven’t tried MailPoet yet and have signed up to find out more about us. 

And in addition to the promotion of our product, we’ve also highlighted a few of our blog posts. As our monthly newsletter contains a roundup of our latest posts, we’ve used this opportunity to give readers a taste of what’s to come, as well as promote some key pieces of content from our website.

Your welcome email should be used to show your new subscribers what’s great about your business. For example, if you’re a food blogger, why not include your top reviewed recipe for readers to try? Or if you run a consultancy business, you could include a case study of a recent project you undertook, or perhaps a link to download a how-to guide.

For ecommerce store owners, welcome emails are a great way to reward subscribers for their interest in your brand. Why not include an exclusive discount code, and highlight your top products? Just make sure you mention your discount in your signup forms – you’ll incentivize more users to sign up that way 😉.

For more ideas on how to use welcome emails to engage your audience, make sure you check out our ultimate guide.

Should I send the email immediately after confirmation?

That will depend on how important you consider the information. People are much less likely to read your email if it is sent immediately, as they’ve already had to open the signup confirmation email.

However, if you’re sending a discount offer, you’ll probably want to send it soon, especially if you used the offer as a means of getting people to sign up (e.g. Sign up to our newsletter to get 10% off your first order).

In a nutshell: if it’s not important, don’t send the welcome email immediately, try an hour or two later. This way, you are likely to get higher engagement. If it’s not working for you, try reducing or increasing time.

How do I set up welcome emails in MailPoet?

It’s easy!  Go to MailPoet > Emails > Add new.

Choose ‘Welcome Email’ and select ‘When someone subscribes to the list‘. Choose your list and the amount of time you’d like to wait before sending the email.

Create your newsletter then select ‘Activate‘.

Even more emails

Don’t limit yourself to just one welcome email.  You can build a whole “welcome program” and create your own drip campaign. All you have to do is change when each email is automatically sent.

For instance:

• Your first email could be about you and what you stand for, and go out immediately.
• The second email could have more information about your blog posts and products, and go out one week later.
• A third email could have a discount offer or some unique content, and go out two weeks after the initial email.

This post concludes our series on improving your signup confirmation sequence! We’d love to hear if you’ve made any improvements to your email signup program – do leave us a comment.