Your welcome series emails are some of the most important emails you’ll send as an ecommerce marketer. This is when your customers are most interested in your brand, and most likely to buy.
Experian found that welcome emails are opened 4X more often and clicked 5X more than regular promotional emails. But most importantly, welcome emails generate 8X MORE REVENUE!
With SmartrMail’s new auto-responders you can automate an unlimited amount of emails when a customer subscribes to your email list on your Shopify or BigCommerce store.
Regardless of how many emails you end up automating, ensuring you have these 3 emails in your welcome series will engage your customers and get you more sales for your store.
Email 1: Welcome + Coupon
Subject: Welcome to {Brand Name} | Enjoy 10% Off Your First Purchase
When: Immediately
Content: Keep this email short and sweet. The goal is to drive your customers back to your site to make a purchase while giving them a good first impression of your brand.
When designing the first email in your welcome series include:
- A sincere thank you
- Creative imagery highlighting your brand
- Strong and visible call to action
- Links to your social profiles
As this is when your customers are most excited about your brand and likely to buy from email, help push them across the line with a meaningful discount between 10-20% or a free gift with purchase. You can add a few popular products but be careful as overcrowding with content and branding will only distract your customers and lower your conversion rates.
Email 2: Branding + Most Popular Products
Subject: Explore {Brand Name}
When: 3 days after signup
Content: Now that you’ve welcomed your customer and made a meaningful offer, it’s time to start letting them get to know you, and your brand better. There’s more than one way to do this but try to hit at least a couple of these points:
- What makes your brand different?
- Why should the customer buy your products over others?
- What are the benefits of buying your products?
- Who are you and why did you start this business?
We really like how Elysium puts a face to their brand with their welcome email.
As you familiarize your customer with your brand, also familiarize them with your products. Since you don’t have much data on them yet, include a handful of your most popular products or staff picks (like the example above) for them to browse. This is also a great time to promote your social profiles by adding links in the footer, and if your customer still hasn’t purchased – include a section with the welcome offer too.
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Email 3: Educational Content
Subject: {Blog Post Title}
When: 6 days after sign up
Content: In today’s marketing world, content is king. Whether you’re selling dresses or drones – your ecommerce store should have at least one blog post or page that educates your customers on the benefits of your products or the problems that it solves. Not only do these educational pieces lead into natural pitches for your products, the use of careful keywording boosts your SEO efforts and traffic to your site.
Even if your product is as boring laundry detergent, it can be hard to run out of content ideas:
- 5 Laundry Tips to Remove Oil Stains
- 8 Harmful Toxins in Laundry Detergent (and 1 brand that doesn’t have any)
- How to keep your whites white
- The differences in quality laundry detergent
- The 5 most environmentally friendly laundry products
You get the idea, the list goes on…
When sending your welcome education email include a bold image and text introducing your the article and strong call-to-action to “Read More”. You can also add a few relevant products to the email along with your social links. If you’re closing your welcome series on this email, let your customer know the other emails they can expect to get from you – such as weekly product recommendation emails and holiday specials.
Read: 10 Black Friday and Cyber Monday Email Marketing Tips
Closing Note:
There’s no magic number when it comes to implementing your welcome email series, but at the very least you should implement these 3 emails. Since you don’t have the data yet on your customers it’s important to add your popular products as they’ve already been vetted by your current customers.
If you want to lengthen your series, you can add a twist by including product emails with customer testimonials, product reviews, or social posts raving about your store.
With SmartrMail you can automate an unlimited amount of welcome emails and add products 5x faster than you can on MailChimp with our Shopify and BigCommerce product lookup. You don’t have to stop there either, automate product recommendation emails and abandoned cart recovery to save you time and supercharge your sales!
