Using Welcome Emails Effectively, mailing manager

'I found Mailing Manager an extremely useful package. It is extremely cost effective and has delivered results with easy to use tools. The perfect product!'

Steven Forrest
Marketing Communications Manager
Exterity Ltd

‘We’re in the customer service business so we place a very high value on the customer service we receive ourselves. Thank you for your hard work and fast turnaround time; we really appreciate it.’

Helen Levy, Director, Chouchoute Chocolaterie

'The software's really easy to use and the team has been really helpful throughout. Thanks'

Liz Thatcher PR
Lichfield District Council

Using Welcome Emails Effectively

A welcome email is the first point of contact from you to your recipient and can be a very effective message if thought about properly.

As they have just opted into your email list you have to consider that they’re at the time of the welcome email reaching them, highly receptive to any material you put forward to them. Knowing this fact can enable you to secure a high long-term deliverability and open rate.

One of the best things you can do is ask the user to “whitelist” you. To ask them to whitelist you, you simply have to ask them to add your address to their contacts list in their account. This will then enable you (in certain email inboxes) to bypass most of the spam filters they have in place as the user has you as a trusted sender. This will allow you to be a bit more creative with your design and not so creative with your wording; the email marketers dream.

This is also a time where you can start to entice them with special offers. In the first welcoming email you could offer a “sign up” discount for all new users or just display your current offers. Just remember, you’re guaranteed a really high open rate and it would be a shame not to capitalise on that just a little bit.

When I say “a little bit”, I really do mean it. There is a limit to how much you can hit them with to start with. Remember you’re not whitelisted just yet and bombarding them with promotions is not advised. The majority (79%) of welcoming emails are constructed in html (source:EEC – Retail Subscription Benchmark Study) but most of them are constructed in html “light”, a scaled down version of html with emphasis placed on text content, not image. So bear this in mind when constructing your welcome email template.