8 Welcome E-mail Suggestions I’ve Realized From 6 Years at Litmus | Zombie Tech

Each new e mail subscriber or buyer is a chance to attach…or to bother.

You need your welcome emails to be on the best facet of the spectrum excited vs. authoritative, or personalised vs. simply plain creepy. However there are such a lot of use circumstances for welcome emails. How are you aware what to ship, to whom and when?

We have tried nearly each welcome and onboarding e mail thought you possibly can consider within the six years I have been at Litmus. Listed below are a few of the most essential issues that make for an impactful homecoming journey, primarily based on what I’ve discovered firsthand.

What’s a welcome e mail journey?

A welcome e mail journey, additionally referred to as an onboarding sequence or welcome emails, welcomes new subscribers or prospects.

The main points of your welcome emails differ relying on who receives them. For instance, a brand new publication subscriber and a free trial buyer have totally different expectations and objectives after they open an e mail from you. For instance, a product demo GIF would seem random to somebody who thought they’d see your greatest weblog posts.

The commonest methods to make use of a welcome experience are:

• Share your greatest content material with new publication subscribers to extend engagement and nurture leads
• To show free trial shoppers about your product to assist them get to that ‘aha’ second and improve to a paid account
• Introduce new paying prospects to your model and product line

The welcome emails you may use depend upon the kind of group you are in, resembling a SaaS firm vs. an eCommerce firm. Right here at Litmus, now we have two primary e mail welcome journeys. The primary is a lead nurturing sequence for brand spanking new subscribers that we use to function Litmus and our content material. The second is a shopper onboarding sequence for brand spanking new free trial customers.

8 Welcome E-mail Suggestions I Realized Over Six Years at Litmus

Throughout my time at Litmus, we have experimented with our welcome and onboarding emails numerous occasions, studying one thing new every time.

Listed below are eight suggestions and greatest practices for welcome emails that I hope can assist you and your workforce.

1. Create Visually Distinct Welcome Emails

Our welcome emails are visually distinct from our Litmus month-to-month publication templates. We select to make use of totally different designs for these emails for 2 primary causes:

1. Assist new subscribers differentiate emails, as they clearly do not know the mechanics of our e mail sequences.

Publication subscribers obtain a welcome e mail instantly with hyperlinks to the primary content material.

2. Visually distinctive layouts assist stop subscribers from getting overwhelmed by emails.

The primary welcome e mail is distributed instantly after registration. They then obtain a weekly vitamin e mail along with the month-to-month Litmus Information. If these emails all look the identical, you would set the expectation that we’ll ship a number of emails per week on a regular basis (which we do not).

2. Verify take a look at data instantly (in case individuals overlook)

Elevate your hand when you’ve ever signed up for a free trial or publication and instantly bought distracted by one other activity. I do know that I’m responsible. Generally individuals who join free trials aren’t able to take part, so we made positive they’ve a reminder of their inbox. Transactional e mail acknowledges their free trial to allow them to log in later. We then ship out 5 onboarding emails in the course of the seven-day free trial. We additionally wish to let individuals know within the preliminary e mail about what sorts of emails we’ll be sending out within the coming days.

The primary free take a look at e mail lets prospects know their account is prepared.

3. Introduce content material and options primarily based on earlier actions

I as soon as obtained an onboarding e mail with a screenshot of a function I hadn’t touched on but. It was a bit complicated to leap into what felt like the center of a narrative in progress.

Incremental progress and exploration are far much less intimidating than large leaps ahead. Should you can, use action-based triggers to ship welcome emails. When introducing a brand new function or use case throughout onboarding emails, attempt to tie it to one thing the client has already interacted with.

For instance, we would not need to introduce Litmus E-mail Analytics to somebody who hasn’t created a single e mail but. As a substitute, we would anticipate to ship an e mail about engagement analytics after somebody has created, examined, and despatched an e mail throughout their free trial. One of many first actions we introduce throughout a free trial is to see what your present emails appear like in over 300,000 potential renderings.

Every free trial welcome e mail has an motion for individuals to discover.

4. Gather Buyer Knowledge to Personalize Time-Based mostly Emails

Motion-based e mail triggers are nice, however only some groups can entry that knowledge. Nonetheless, that does not imply you are caught with cookie-cutter messages that look the identical to each new subscriber or buyer. With just a bit little bit of buyer data, you possibly can customise e mail content material even when everybody will get the identical sort of message on the identical time.

I’ll use our sequence for instance. Suppose we all know {that a} free trial consumer is an e mail developer. In that case, we advocate our E-mail Builder because it pertains to your function. Equally, we are able to ask publication subscribers what ESP they use after which nurture them as leads primarily based on their responses.

Dynamic e mail content material lets you routinely personalize emails as a substitute of making a number of variations. For instance, PrettyLittleThing makes use of Litmus Personalize to routinely replace zodiac messages primarily based on when subscribers open their birthday message.

PrettyLittleThing’s birthday message routinely adjusts photographs when a subscriber opens the e-mail.

5. Use clicks to fulfill subscribers

If you cannot set off emails primarily based on app interplay and do not accumulate buyer data at signup, you continue to have choices! You should utilize hyperlink clicks that can assist you personalize your welcome emails. Think about that you just work for an e-commerce model that sells specialty meals merchandise. Your welcome e mail may hyperlink to totally different product classes, and you would ship subsequent emails primarily based on what an individual interacted with.

Simply take into account that some corporations have bots that click on each hyperlink in an e mail to examine for safety points. So if a subscriber opens your e mail at work, they could get inaccurate knowledge. Earlier than basing your welcome e mail technique on hyperlink clicks, think about using a “faux hyperlink” that’s not seen to human readers, or monitoring your hyperlink clicks for a couple of months to see if these bots are prevalent in your prepared.

6. Do not anticipate the identical e mail efficiency between onboarding and newsletters

Let’s speak about landmarks. When you may anticipate e mail metrics like click-through charges to be excessive when individuals first work together with your small business, which may not be the case. We have discovered that onboarding emails are likely to underperform newsletters or promotional emails.

As I discussed earlier, generally individuals join your e mail checklist or free trial after which overlook about it. Simply because somebody begins a free trial would not at all times imply they’re able to go immediately.

I like to recommend evaluating your welcome journeys individually from different kinds of campaigns.

7. Ship everybody a welcome journey

We don’t use exclusion teams that A/B take a look at welcome or onboarding emails towards any e mail. For starters, you want a really excessive sending quantity to get statistically vital outcomes. Additionally, what occurs when you do not ship a welcome e mail to somebody who actually wants it? Whereas we’re nonetheless A/B testing and experimenting with our welcome emails, everyone seems to be getting some model.

8. Consider and experiment

Talking of experimenting, individuals generally marvel how usually they need to replace their welcome or onboarding emails. Barring main adjustments, like substantial product updates, sudden drops in engagement, or reductions, we do not contact our welcome e mail journey that always.

Every subscriber solely receives the sequence as soon as, not like a weekly publication template, so we consider efficiency on the finish of every quarter. So, we are able to determine on the finish of the yr if we need to make a change.

Among the experiments now we have executed up to now embody:

• Sending emails ‘from’ the model vs. text-based emails ‘from’ a person
• Updating the template design
• Change the cadence of the sequence
• Pause different kinds of emails whereas somebody is on a welcome journey

What’s subsequent on your onboarding emails?

E-mail advertising is at all times altering, and it is thrilling to marvel what we’ll attempt within the new yr. I’ll regulate evolving e mail engagement traits and draw inspiration from the e-mail group. And also you?