Effective Welcome Email Templates: Convert Subscribers to Customers

The welcome email is the most important email brands can send to new subscribers.

Yes, even more important than all the broadcast, targeted and triggered messages combined.

The welcome email is your best shot at converting new subscribers into customers — and longtime readers.

A well-designed welcome email hits these three notes:

• Provide subscribers with the value proposition you promised during the signup process (e.g. a 15% discount).
• Prompt subscribers to take the next steps in their journey, whether that’s creating an account, completing a download, starting a purchase or whatever your strategic goals are.
• Build engagement right away. Why wait to get the party started?

But not just any welcome email will do.

At this point, you might be thinking, “You don’t need to sell me on welcome emails. My ESP sends them out automatically as soon as subscribers confirm their email addresses. I’m covered, right?”

Probably not.

It’s true that a default welcome email is better than none. (We’re looking at you, MailChimp users.) But you can expect better results from a welcome email that is strategically designed with the look and voice of your brand, with content that tackles the three points listed above.

After all, that’s true email marketing.

Speaking of MailChimp, in the Email Gallery below you will see how two BigCommerce customers improved on MailChimp’s serviceable but ho-hum welcome email format. Let’s dive in!

More than half of brands are missing out

Statistics on how many brands send welcome letters vary. Most hover a few points above or below 50%:

• A 2015 Salesforce benchmark study found 42% of brands send welcome emails. Among those that do, 72% rate them as highly effective.
• Econsultancy’s 2017 survey of UK and U.S. marketers found 44% sent welcome emails – surprisingly, down 2% points from 46% in 2016.
• Among Internet Retailer’s top 100 ecommerce websites, 87% send welcome emails, and 49% percent of those brands send more than one.

It’s also worth noting that 3 out of 4 email subscribers expect to see a welcome email after subscribing.

Be there for them!

Welcome emails are a big deal

These stats (all averages) are from BigCommerce partner Soundest, showing what welcome emails can deliver:

• 45.7% open rate (compared to 18.8% on promo emails)
• 9.7% click rate (compared to 3.8% on promo emails)
• 1% conversion rate (compared to 0.17% on promo emails)
• 61 cents revenue per email (compared to 10 cents on promo emails). Revenue per email can go up to $3.36 on optimized emails.

Given the stats we’ve seen so far, I hope we can all agree that sending a welcome email is a no-brainer. In the next section you’ll find some tips and tricks to help you design a great welcome email and start making money for your brand via more loyal customers.

6 easy ways to optimize your welcome email

Follow these tips to add value to your emails and prompt subscribers to start engaging with you.

1. Send your welcome email ASAP

Real-time welcome emails drive up to 10X better results than messages batched and sent one day or even a few hours later.

Start communicating with your subscribers while you’re still top-of-mind.

Here’s an example.

1. You land on their site
2. They push you to sign up via an email to get an immediate discount (that you are encouraged to use in 60 minutes or less –– GENIUS)
3. Then you get an immediate welcome email (with an additional ad on the side).

2. Include branded imagery

No disrespect to our IT colleagues, but they aren’t marketers. Default emails just state the obvious:

• “Your subscription is confirmed.”
• “You successfully created an account.”

By the way: Those are confirmation emails, not welcome emails. If that’s what you send to new subscribers, you’re not sending welcome emails.

People connect with other people, so your message should sound like one human being speaking to another. That’s what moves subscribers to engage with your brand (and, ultimately, convert).

Make sure your welcome email template plays nicely with your other email templates. And don’t forget to include imagery that is aligned with your website –– this helps reinforce your brand.

Here’s a great example from Tommy John. Note –– this is a WELCOME email. Not a subscription confirmed email.

3. Ask the subscriber to do something

It doesn’t have to be a big ask. In fact, it shouldn’t be. You don’t want to scare anybody off by asking them to fill out a preference form with more questions than a job application.

Invite subscribers to take the next step with you.

That might mean checking out your products or completing a low-hurdle request, such as answering a one-to-two-question survey (that will give you data you can use for segmentation and targeting).

The CTA should be totally on brand. We love jeweler Judith Bright’s call to action, in a gold-colored button: “Go Get Yourself Some Jewelry!” Irresistible.

Better Decision Making Made Easy

Fast-scaling businesses use metris dashboards to guide their meetings and decision making – taking gut preference out of the process in favor of data-driven results. 

Use this dashboard to see the same results for your brand. 

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4. Track email behavior right away to ward off inactivity

Here’s how you keep subscribers from morphing into Zombies: Don’t wait months or years before putting them into a reactivation program.

Subscriber interest can wane within days or weeks.

Segment your new subscribers, and see who’s opening and clicking and who isn’t.

Resend the welcome email to anyone that didn’t open or click your first few emails –– or send a follow-up message asking if they’re having problems with the email or site.

5. Rename your welcome email to reflect the outcome you want

Secretly, you want your welcome email to do more than welcome subscribers. It should prompt them to take actions that will increase their value to you, such as buying for the first time or creating an account.

This means your welcome email could become a “first-purchase” email, or an “upgrade” email.

It doesn’t lessen the value of saying “Welcome to our fabulous email program.” But it forces you to think strategically about what you want this email to accomplish, and that will guide the email’s design and content.

Here are a few headline examples from the brands we’ve already covered above:

See a trend? This leads us to….

6. Deliver opt-in incentives and rewards in the welcome email

If you offer a discount, freebie or other incentive in exchange for the email address, deliver it in the welcome email.

Sorry for being cynical, but it’s too easy for someone to give you a fake or throwaway email address, grab the incentive from a thank-you page on your site, and split.

Use that page for your IT-approved success notice instead where you notify subscribers to look in their inbox for your special welcome email which will have important information and their goodies.

Here’s how NaturallyCurly.com does it: