When you are an e-comm store owner, you know how demanding a job it can be to acquire new customers and retain the old ones. How many promotional campaigns must one run, how many loyalty programs should one start to gain a dedicated band of followers? What about all those people who land on your website, like what you have to offer, leave the site and then forget all about it? Also, those one-time buyers who forget the names of the small brands they’ve shopped for. How do you remind them about your brand? By convincing them to sign up for your newsletter, which should serve as a reminder about why they liked your brand in the first place! You need to get to the point where they look forward to your emails. But to get there, you need to convert them with your very first email – the welcome email. Read on for some tips to help you draft that perfect welcome email!
1. Out with the boring: Once a user has left your website, emails are the most effective means to get back in touch with them. Of the 60-90 emails that a working person gets on an average daily, what are the chances that yours is going to stand out and make them recall your brand? By being different. Standard welcome email templates have been replicated countless times and users would rather not read another boring one, no matter how impressed by the brand they are! Try a radical content tone or design for yours and rest assured that your welcome email would be doing so much more than just welcoming users onto your platform.
2. Make it memorable: Why are welcome emails so important? Because they set the trend for the rest of the emails that will follow. Also, it’s your one chance to make a distinctive impression on your reader, the chances of whose opening subsequent emails are only 18% compared to a superior 45% open rate chance that the welcome email has. While you are thinking of ways to make it more memorable, remember not to limit the extent of your creativity to the content and design of your welcome email. Something as simple as a unique, fun micro interaction can make all the difference between ordinary and noteworthy. So, know that the possibilities are endless when it comes to adding features to your welcome email in order to make it striking.
3. Everyone loves deals: One way to show your appreciation to all those who have signed up—either on your e-comm platform or for your brand’s newsletter—is by giving them an exclusive offer. It could be anything from a freebie along with their next purchase, a discount or a coupon code, or any incentive that would make a difference to the members of your target audience. The chances of your welcome email getting marked as ‘important’ or ‘saved for later’ are higher when they contain something of value to your customer.
4. Eye-catching subject lines: A huge majority of email users decide whether or not to open an email based on its subject line. So, the catchier your welcome email’s subject line is, the higher the open rate!
5. Give a brief introduction to your brand: Not everybody is going to read the ‘About Us’ page on your website and hence, it is imperative to have a brief write-up about your brand in your welcome email. Highlight your USP and every other feature that sets your brand apart from the rest. Let it reassure your users about their decision to follow your brand, and make them feel like they did the right thing.
6. Insert contact details and social links: Right, it is the welcome email and your user has just signed up on your platform, so what reason could they possibly have to get in touch with you? So many! Whether it is a clueless user who is unsure of how to remove a product from the cart, a member of the press reaching out to you for comments, a social media influencer who might be interested in affiliate marketing or another business that wants to collaborate with you, the number of people who might find your contact information relevant are so many!
7. Request users to whitelist: Ever wondered how certain promotional emails make it to your inbox while a big chunk of them end up in your spam folder? In order to make sure that all your emails are delivered straight to their inbox, you could appeal to your users to whitelist—or in other—words add you to their address book.
8. Humanize the content: Churning out quality content for the masses usually results in a high dependence on pre-ready content in the template form. But users see right through that and they are not impressed. Personalize each email to address the user; make them feel like there is human being on the other side of their digital screen and establish a relationship with them that they wouldn’t want to have with a bot. Employ a conversational tone, crack a joke if you have to, and give some life to your email content!
9. Respect a user’s choice: If, despite everything you have done, the user wishes to unfollow your brand or unsubscribe from your newsletter, always make it easy for them to do so. Personally, I dislike brands that make it difficult for me to find the unsubscribe button or forces me to go through multiple steps to get my name off their mailing list. While it makes sense from a business’s point of view to do as much as you can to retain your followers, you wouldn’t want them to harbor negative feelings towards your brand now, would you?
Once you nail the perfect welcome email, there will be no stopping you from creating subsequent ones that are equally awesome. In the meantime, you could refer to our ‘13 Pointers for Writing Effective Emails’ for more tips.
