You know the drill: you opt-in to someone’s mailing list, and soon you receive a confirmation email from them, welcoming you to the list, newsletter or whatever you just opted in for. The fact that we are expecting these emails is a major reason why they are usually opened. But how does the sender craft these emails for best effect?
There are several best practices that not only will get you off on the right foot with your new subscribers, but will help them to understand and better use your services and products.
Welcome emails tend to be opened at a pretty high rate, but it’s what you include in them that sets the stage for what follows. Let’s have a look at 7 of the ways you can compose your emails for best results.
7 Tips for crafting welcome emails
Don’t batch: send them immediately – While it might be more server-efficient to batch your emails to send out together, its poor form to do so with a new subscriber. Show that you care a little by sending these right away.
Use a working email address – Using a no-reply email address will only do one thing for you: give you a no-response customer. People are going to want to email you. Don’t make it difficult.
Split-test your welcome email subject lines – This is quite easy to do, and can make a big difference in your open rates. Wouldn’t you want to do this for a potential 15-20 percent increase in opens?
Use your social media channels – Encourage your subscribers to follow you on your social media channels, and even help them by making sure you have links and buttons on your email template.
Personalize – It’s always best if you’re trying to develop some sort of relationship with your subscribers that you personalize the emails if at all possible. This of course means you’ll need to collect names.
Consider offering an incentive – A lot of companies opt to send along a coupon or other incentive as a welcome gift. Not a bad idea, and can move relationship from a subscriber to a buyer swiftly.
Make sure to optimize for mobile – Since around half of all emails are now opened on a mobile device, it would be a good idea to make sure you are using a responsive design so that your emails can be opened anywhere.