It’s good manners to send new e-mail subscribers a welcome message. But it can be good manners and effective marketing to send them a welcome series of messages.
E-mail service provider Listrak suggests going beyond a single automated welcome message with several sequential e-mails to set recipient expectations and, hopefully, encourage greater customer engagement. With a series, you can better explain the benefits of subscribing and of doing business with your organization, as well as ask the new subscribers for profile information that will enable you to craft more-relevant messages down the road.
In its whitepaper “Creating an E-commerce Welcome Series to Increase Subscriber Engagement and E-mail ROI,” Listrak offers some advice:
· * Set specific goals, not only for the series overall but also for each message within the series. Once you know what you want to accomplish, you can determine how many messages it will take you to achieve those goals.
· * Kick off the series right away. Send the initial message as soon as the subscriber has opted in. Even a delay of 24 hours can decrease responsiveness.
· * Segment. For instance, “if a buyer chooses to opt in to your list during the checkout process on your Web site, he could receive a welcome series including member benefits, return policies, etc.,” Listrak suggests. “However, if the subscriber opts in without making a purchase, your welcome series could include special offers, product reviews, and video testimonials to encourage the first sale.”
· * Differentiate the welcome series from your other e-mail campaigns. This includes making it clear, from the subject line and/or opening text, that the welcome e-mails are indeed part of an introductory series. If there are three messages in the series, make that apparent (“This is part 1 of Widgets.com’s 3-part Welcome Series”). And do not send new subscribers any other marketing e-mails until they’ve received the entire welcome series. Otherwise you risk confusing them mightily.
· * Keep your branding prominent. Don’t forget, these are new subscribers. The “from” line, the header information, and everything else should make it clear that it is your organization sending the messages.
· * Recap the previous messages, and preview the upcoming messages. “Brief statements to keep subscribers on track and eliminate confusion like ‘In the first message you learned about the benefits of our membership’ and ‘In the next message you’ll learn about our return policy’ are extremely useful,” according to Listrak.
· * Test, test, and keep testing. Test the number of e-mails in your series, the time frame in which you send them, the content of the messages… But of course you already knew that.
