Every ecommerce store needs an email welcome series. This isn’t just a nice-to-have to give your new subscribers the warm-and-fuzzies, either.
An email welcome series is a collection of emails that you send after someone signs up to join your email list. These messages are the first touch-points you’ll have with a customer who is raising their hand and saying:
“Look at me! I just willingly gave you my personal info because I like your website! I might want to give you my money, too! Please talk to me!”
Not immediately engaging with the enthusiastic people who are opting into your marketing emails is a huge miss, because welcome emails:
- Have a 91% open rate
- Are 42% more likely to be read than an average email
- Have 5X the clickthrough rate of a typical marketing campaign
- Can generate 3X more revenue per email than the typical promo email
If you don’t have a solid email welcome series in place, you’re most definitely leaving money on the table. Thankfully, setting up or optimizing your welcome series can be relatively easy with the right strategy and tools.
What should a welcome email series include?
- Automation
- A discount or gift
- Urgency
- Product visuals
- Reinforcement of your brand and subscriber perks
These are must-haves for any business that wants to build a successful welcome series. Let’s dig into why they are non-negotiables.
1. Automate your welcome series to reach new subscribers at the best time
It’s incredibly important to set up your welcome series as an automated flow in your customer engagement platform, not something that you send as a one-off blast. The most successful marketing emails are timely ones, and most subscribers are going to expect a welcome email immediately upon signing up for your newsletter.
Make sure your first welcome email goes out as soon as someone signs up for your newsletter, especially if you’ve promised them a discount on the website in return for their email address.
That promised discount code might have primed them to make a purchase, but they’ll abandon it if the discount takes hours to arrive in their inbox.
Every customer engagement platform — Klaviyo, Shopify, etc. — will have capability to build out an automated flow so you can set things like criteria for entry into the flow, how many messages should be in the flow, and how much time there should be between each message. These platforms should also give you the option to include email and SMS, in the event that you’ve also collected their phone number.
An ideal length for an email welcome series is 3-6 messages, though monitor metrics closely and adjust as needed. You might find that the welcome emails are incredibly lucrative so you’ll want to extend the series, or you might find that it’s too long and needs to be trimmed because engagement significantly dips after a specific amount of time.
2. Include a discount or gift from the very beginning
There’s no need to play coy with your brand-new customers: They want discounts, and you want sales. Make them feel special with a welcome discount or gift right off the bat, and they’ll be more likely to reciprocate the good vibes by purchasing from your store.
Here’s an example of a welcome email graphic with a discount:
This is called — you guessed it — “reciprocity” in marketing. You make a customer feel special, and they will want to reciprocate by spending their dollars with you.
There’s no need to “save” your discounts and special offers for later in a welcome series or subsequent promo email. Lead with your best offer to win new customers over quickly.
First, make sure you’ve developed a discount strategy that protects your margin but delivers savings to your new customers.
Second, make sure your discount feels exclusive. If your website always offers free shipping on orders over $100, that isn’t going to inspire much reciprocity. Build a special coupon code just for new customers, or offer a special gift with their first purchase. If you use this special offer on your website pop-up to get new signups (which you should), make sure that same discount is reflected in your first welcome email.
3. Infuse time pressure into your welcome discount
Yes, you want the discount to be the star of your welcome series. But, you also want to put some time pressure on that discount to encourage your new customers to buy.
Putting a time constraint on your discount — say, that it must be used within a week of receipt — and including “last chance” emails in the welcome series to reinforce that the special discount is going away will add some urgency and spur more orders.
Here’s an example of a “last chance” email that you could put later in your welcome series:
Remember: Existing purchasers are up to 14X more likely to purchase again than new customers, so it’s important to get turn those new subscribers into paying customers as fast as possible.
4. Put your best photos forward and lean on product visuals
It’s perfectly fine to have a plain-text email in your welcome series. In fact, many brands find that a welcome note from the founder or CEO that explains the brand and shows gratitude for their signup can go a long way to build customer loyalty. But most of your emails should showcase the products that you want your customers to buy.
Here are a few examples of welcome emails that let products shine:
Choose graphic treatments that make your products stand out, lean on your best-sellers to wow new subscribers, and consider special touches like animated designs to really make your welcome emails pop.
Use some real estate to emphasize why your brand is unique (more on that below), but keep your emails simple and graphic-forward. Focus more on showing than telling.
5. Emphasize your brand’s uniqueness and subscriber perks
Your subscribers will have some idea of your brand and backstory if they found your website and signed up for your newsletter. But nurturing brand loyalty starts from the very start of your relationship with a new customer.
Almost 90% of consumers would switch to a brand that shares their values and life outlook — so don’t be shy about sharing your company’s backstory and mission. And, obviously, brand loyalty feeds into your bottom line. Existing purchasers are more likely to purchase again, customer lifetime values increase, etc.
To that end, there are a few key ways to build brand loyalty in your welcome series:
- Brand your emails. This might seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many ecommerce businesses don’t lean on their branded colors or logo when sending marketing emails. Reinforce your brand early on.
- Shout your subscription perks from the rooftops. These are the always-on-tap special touches that every customer enjoys all the time, not the exclusive discount you’ll give new customers for joining. Mention perks like free shipping, rewards programs, referral programs, SMS offers. You want your subscribers to absorb (quickly!) that you provide an exceptional customer experience.
- Emphasize what makes you unique. Non-toxic ingredients? Sustainable materials? Lots of 5-star reviews? Endorsements from popular publications or celebrities? Family-owned company for generations?
Whatever makes you special, weave that story into your welcome series. This can be as simple as a few words on a graphic — “locally sourced,” “award-winning,” “family-owned,” “as featured on…” — or a sentence or two in the email body copy.
Our welcome email templates are customizable so that you can infuse your brand into any design. Take a look at our Yellow Flowers template, for instance:
And then see how it transforms when branded to a specific merchant (in just seconds):
The customizations were simple — different colors, product imagery, and a background image that aligned with the brand. But, you can see how the brand comes across in such a strong way.
How Grid & Pixel Can Improve Your Email Welcome Series
Your email welcome series can be a huge moneymaker and loyalty-builder, especially if the visuals tell a compelling story about your business. We make it incredibly easy to create personalized email and SMS graphics for each user that can be instantly branded to your store. We have hundreds of ready-made templates to choose from. And, when you add our Shopify app, it automatically pulls in your Shopify products so it’s easy to pick the images for each graphic.
All of the graphics above can be customized and exported to customer engagement platforms like Klaviyo in less than a minute, saving you hours of design work.
Consider that it takes the average marketer 4 hours to design an email, and you’re looking at saving an entire calendar day’s worth of work by using our app to build stunning graphics and animations for your welcome series.
Check out our Shopify app and its 5-star reviews in the Shopify store today.
