One Thing That Makes Welcome Emails Worth Reading
Every brand seems to send a welcome email - you could pretty much predict it as soon as you subscribe to anyone or buy anything. Generally it's good practice to do it.
That said, I've noticed that as a consumer, I only really like a few of them. From a brand finance POV, welcome emails are by far the biggest revenue drivers when it comes to email marketing. Usually the abandoned cart and abandoned browse are the two runners up.
It's going to sound harsh but to me as a consumer (and marketer), most welcome emails are pretty useless. But some of them really stand out and actually mean something.
Let's talk about it.
First off, people only really open emails for 3 reasons imo: inspiration, utility, or personal benefit. A welcome email is a pretty good chance to do at least one of those. Most brands use it to offer discounts, but then that trains their customer base to expect them (or worse, to NOT buy without a discount).
What makes a welcome email good is providing something useful for the reader while at the same time helping them understand the brand.
A few examples of that useful thing can be:
- A product how-to, showing folks how they can use what they just bought or might buy soon;
- Background information on your brand or product to build trust;
- A breakdown of your price so that buyers are more comfortable with it (Quince does this a lot on their product pages and it's pretty smart);
For example, if you're running a welcome series for a durable luggage brand, the welcome email is a perfect time to prove to the reader that your product is as durable as you say it is. Show gifs of your testing process. Tell them where your supplies come from, how intense your build process is. Instead of building annoyance, you're building some trust now. The reader could send this to their friends and get their opinions on it (or get their friends to buy too.)
A few examples of good welcome emails:
The reason why a lot of these are good is because they tell the reader more about what they're getting into instead of just trying to entice them in one way (constant discounts).
It's hard to find a really good ecommerce welcome email or series because most brands just jump straight to selling you after one line about what the product is.
The longer someone is on an email list, the more reasons they should have to pay full price for your product — and this goes for e-commerce, SaaS, etc.
Any factors you think are necessary in a welcome email or series?