Make the best first impression: 7 Tips for the most Effective Welcome and Confirmation Emails
The subscription confirmation email is the perfect chance to welcome and congratulate new recipients of your email newsletter, but it’s often neglected. We’ve signed up for a ton of mailing lists so we can provide great examples of email creative, but we’ve found that marketers either miss a trick or simply don’t send anything.
Yesterday we posted 11 great examples of engaging welcome emails – here’s our top tips to improve your welcome and confirmation emails:
Welcome your new recipients
“Thanks – you’re our hero” is what Lastminute.com told us in their great welcome email (back in 2007, and we’ve read their emails ever since). Granted, that’s a lot down to their tone of voice, but it shows that there’s better and more friendly ways to welcome your eager new readers than just saying “newsletter confirmation”.
Add Creative
You’ll be surprised how many subscription and welcome emails are just plain text affairs, without even a basic link to the merchant’s website. Granted, there may be deliverability concerns around sending full html to a new subscriber (although if you have a good reputation there’s nothing to worry about here), but this is a golden opportunity to introduce subscribers to your branding, and even encourage them to convert.
Give a reason to open your newsletters
Tell your new subscribers what you’ll be sending them, when, and why they should look out for your email. It’s an easy way to boost your open rates as your recipients will know to look out for your newsletter.
Add Personalisation
At the very least you now know your new recipient’s email address – custom publish it in somewhere to confirm you have the right address. The chances are you also know more of their data, so greet them by name. If you’re running any kind of membership club users are likely to archive the welcome email as it’ll contain useful information (username, password, preferences etc.).
If you have a preference centre then link to that so your recipients can tell you what they want to hear about.
Whitelist Instructions
Now’s the perfect time to ask your new subscribers to add your send address to their address book, contacts or safe list. This marks your mailings as safe and helps you avoid the spam folder. For any given webmail client, the aggregate of how many users do this will also boost your reputation across the whole service (ie. If enough people do this, it’ll improve your reputation even for people who don’t whitelist you).
An offer
If you’ve incentivized people to subscribe to your list with a discount offer, here’s where you should tell them about it and encourage them to engage with your site. Don’t go overboard, but there’s probably even scope to include a small sales piece.
Links to previous newsletters
Filling up your welcome email with products and offers probably isn’t the best way to go, but if someone’s just subscribed to your list the chances are they’re pretty engaged and want to know more. A quick link to your most recent emails will help them find out more, and might even help them convert.
Take a look at some of the examples we picked out yesterday for more inspiration!
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