How to Write a Great Welcome Email for Your New Customers

In its simplest form, a welcome message or email is a formal acknowledgement of a customer or subscriber’s interest in an offering. These emails are delivered after someone purchases your product, subscribes to your service, or signs up for your newsletter.

But when it comes to getting the most out of this communication, welcome messages or emails go beyond this simple definition. When you use effective messaging in your first few interactions with customers or subscribers, welcome messages can drive up your engagement rates for existing customers and your conversion rate for those who have yet to pay for your solutions.

This makes a welcome message a chance to make a first impression and ensure a lasting relationship with your audience. As a result, this particular email stands out as one of the most important pieces of communication between you and the email recipient.

The importance of welcome emails

There are several factors that relate to the importance of a welcome message. This also holds true for all cases, whether you are sending these emails to paying customers or free newsletter subscribers.

Some factors that contribute to the importance of welcome messages include but are not limited to the following:

They make recipients feel appreciated for their interest

A well-drafted welcome message serves the basic purpose of giving a warm reception to your customers or subscribers. This makes them feel appreciated for their business or interest, and contributes to their positive perception of your brand. This is one of the simplest yet most crucial factors that make a welcome message so important.

They set expectations for what is to come next

When a customer purchases your solutions or subscribes to your newsletter, they are like a tourist visiting an attraction. While they may have basic information about your business, they know little to nothing about the in-depth experience. A welcome message ideally handles this factor and explains what they can expect from your offerings.

They acquaint the recipient with your organization

By using an intelligent welcome email template, you can easily describe your organization, its objectives, and its overall approach to navigate its respective industry. This allows many customers and subscribers to learn more about the business that they have chosen to interact with. In many cases, it heightens recipient’s interest and leads to higher engagement rates, which lets you ethically obtain data for aspects such as audience segmentation.

They offer additional information about your products and services

When you describe your organization to your email recipient, it creates a natural segue for you to introduce your product or service lineup. Sending this showcase to existing customers gives you more upselling and cross-selling opportunities. Similarly, delivering this information to newsletter subscribers paves the way to fill out signup forms for any paid solutions that you have at hand.

They contribute to the overall brand experience

From the moment someone shows an interest in your product or service, every instance of communication from your end adds to their overall brand experience. Since welcome messages are equivalent to making a first impression on someone, they set the stage for the quality of services or information that you have to offer to the email recipient.

Due to these reasons, it is important that you follow through on all of these points and pave the way to an ideal experience for your customers and subscribers.

This ensures that you are leaving no stones unturned in making your customers or subscribers feel welcome to your organization, while also showcasing what you have to offer if given a chance at a long-term business relationship.

After learning the importance of a welcome message, even the thought of writing an engaging first email can be enough to run a shiver down your spine. But when you know what to do, this process is no more difficult than a walk in the park.

The following suggestions can help you create ideal welcome messages while keeping unnecessary pressure at bay.

Write a great subject line

When you are writing a welcome message, your email subject line is the very first set of words that your recipient sets their eyes upon. Keeping this in mind, keep your subject line concise yet interesting.

You can keep the following tips in mind to help you with this part.

• Show your appreciation. Remember the basics and thank your recipient.
• Offer a confirmation. Acknowledge that their purchase or sign-up is complete.
• Outline the body content. Explain what they can expect by opening the email.
• Keep it short and sweet. Keep the subject line brief and appealing.

Personalize your email

When searching for welcome email examples, you may stumble upon the common advice to personalize your email. This is because email personalization can drive engagement, establish rapport, and improve your click-through rate (CTR).

On the other hand, sending an automated message that is generic can make your recipient feel unimportant. This could negatively impact their overall experience with your brand and start off your business relationship on a sour note.

Apart from using your recipient’s name, you can also use different layouts, specific geographical references, and segment-specific content that differentiates between paid customers and unpaid subscribers. By using an A/B testing tool, you can also assess real time results from these efforts.

Emphasize the benefits of subscribing

When someone pays for your solutions or subscribes to your newsletters, they have only a surface-level idea of what they are going to receive in return. You should use the welcome message to answer frequently asked questions, and outline the benefits that their decision brings to them.

This provides you with a tremendous opportunity to talk about your organization, your goals, as well as your product or service lineup. This ensures that you are not only driving engagement with the recipient, but also creating a channel for future business from paying customers and free subscribers alike.

Establish expectations

Even when someone purchases your solution or subscribes to your newsletter by choice, they might get wary about receiving future email correspondence from your end. Instead of getting angry unsubscription requests a few weeks into your communication, you should set your audience’s expectations about how frequently they are going to hear from you.

This gives subscribers the choice to opt out from your emails, while also giving you the ability to filter highly interested customers from a sea of email recipients. This helps you with segmenting your audiences, pitching your solutions, and driving more revenue.

Include a call to action

Sending a welcome message to thank customers and subscribers does not mean that you should refrain from asking your recipients to take further actions. By using call to action (CTA) within all of your welcome messages, you can effectively drive your engagement rates and build your sales funnel.

You can also use this opportunity to ask your audience for continuous feedback on your solutions in the future. This way, whenever you take the decision to send surveys for your product or service, you can expect a positive response and higher engagement from these contacts.

While every welcome message should be different, you can still follow a template to ensure that you have all the essentials down. From there, you can further customize your email layouts, branding, and messaging for maximum benefits.

• Draft a brief but engaging email subject line.
• Use your logo or branding at the top of your email.
• Design a visually appealing welcome header image.
• Add a brief yet warm welcome sentence to the welcome header.
• Include a discount code for future purchases.
• Draft an engaging message that outlines what to expect.
• Outline the frequency of future emails and communication.
• Lead off to different sections that describe your organization.
• Utilize one of these sections to highlight your product or service offerings.
• Put information regarding your social media pages along with clickable buttons.
• Integrate CTA buttons throughout your email to encourage further actions.

By keeping these essential points in mind, you can design your very own welcome message.

This practice enables you to fulfill all the crucial requirements of a fruitful welcome email. At the same time, it gives you the flexibility to customize the contents with your own tone, messaging, and visual preferences.

Final notes

Using a welcome message is an essential practice for all businesses as well as those organizations that run a newsletter subscription program. By following email marketing best practices, you can fulfill this requirement for your brand.

As an all-in-one email marketing platform, Mailchimp can help you manage all the tricky requirements of welcome messages. This gives you the power to make your customers and subscribers feel appreciated for their time, while increasing your chances to generate higher engagement and revenue.