The Welcome Email Nobody Wrote

The moment of maximum interest

Somebody has just decided you are worth hearing from, and has typed their address to prove it.

That is the highest their interest in you will be, and it decays from that moment.

A message arriving immediately meets them at the peak. The same message four weeks later, as part of a monthly newsletter, meets somebody who has half forgotten signing up.

Which is why welcome messages are opened at rates no later message approaches, and why the absence of one wastes the best opportunity a small list produces.

What it should do

• Confirm what they signed up for.
• Say what to expect and how often.
• Give something useful immediately.
• Say who you are in a sentence or two.
• Make leaving easy.
• Invite a reply.

The third is what separates a receipt from a welcome, and it is the part most businesses omit because they are saving their material for the newsletter.

Set the expectation immediately

The most practical thing it does, and it prevents most later complaints.

Say how often you send and roughly what about: once a month, practical advice about looking after your heating system, occasional notice of availability.

Somebody who knows a message is coming monthly is not surprised by one, and surprise is what produces a complaint rather than an unsubscribe.

It also constrains you usefully, since having told four hundred people you send monthly is a commitment that keeps a list alive.

Be honest about frequency rather than optimistic. Occasional is safer than weekly if weekly is aspirational.

Give something in the first message

The part that changes how the relationship starts.

Whatever you promised at signup, deliver it here rather than making them wait: the guide, the checklist, the discount, the answer.

Where nothing was promised, give something anyway: the one piece of advice you give every customer, the answer to the question you get on every call.

That establishes that your messages contain something rather than asking for something, which is the pattern people judge future messages against.

It costs one paragraph you have almost certainly written before, and it is the difference between a list that opens your messages and one that ignores them.

A worked example

A business had a signup form on their site producing perhaps eight addresses a month, and sent a newsletter every six weeks.

Somebody signing up therefore heard nothing for up to six weeks, and their first message was a general newsletter that made no reference to them having subscribed.

They added a welcome message: a short confirmation, one paragraph on what to expect, and the three things they tell every customer about maintenance.

It was opened by nearly everybody who received it, against roughly a third for their newsletter.

Two people replied to the first month's welcomes with questions, and one became a customer within a fortnight.

The message took forty minutes to write and has run unchanged since.

Invite a reply

A small instruction with a disproportionate effect.

Ask a direct question and make clear that replies reach a person: what are you trying to sort out, or what made you sign up.

A few people answer, and those replies are the warmest leads a small list produces, because somebody who has just written to you is a conversation rather than a subscriber.

Replies also help your standing with mail providers, since a message somebody responds to is a strong positive signal.

Send it from a real address that a person monitors rather than from a no-reply one, which is the setting that quietly prevents all of this.

One message or a sequence

The question that arrives next, and for a small business the answer is usually one.

A sequence of five messages over two weeks is standard advice and belongs to businesses with something complex to explain or a longer buying process.

For a local trade or service, one good message does nearly all of the work, and a sequence becomes another thing to write, maintain, and check.

Where a sequence is genuinely useful, three is plenty: the welcome, one piece of substantive advice a few days later, and one that mentions what you do and invites contact.

Build the one first, run it for six months, and only extend it if the first is clearly working.

Set it and check it twice a year

Because an automated message runs unattended, which is its advantage and its risk.

Sign up to your own list twice a year, with a personal address, and read what arrives.

Check it still says something true: the frequency you actually send at, a service you still offer, a person who still works there, a link that still resolves.

Automated messages age badly precisely because nobody sees them, and a welcome referring to a service you dropped is worse than none.

Add it to whatever annual check you already do, alongside the footer year and the contact details.

The counter-case

A welcome message is not always the priority.

A business with eight signups a month is spending forty minutes to reach ninety-six people a year, which is worthwhile and is not the largest thing available to them.

Where the list is barely growing, the higher-return work is asking people to join it, since a perfect welcome to nobody achieves nothing.

There is also a version that overreaches: a long, effusive message about the journey somebody is beginning, which reads badly from a plumber and would read badly from anybody.

Keep it short, useful, and recognisably from a person, and spend the remaining effort on getting more people onto the list.

Writing it

1. Send it immediately, not with the next newsletter.
2. Confirm what they signed up for.
3. State the frequency honestly.
4. Deliver something useful in this message.
5. Send from a monitored address, not no-reply.
6. Ask one direct question.
7. Subscribe yourself twice a year and read it.

Step four is what makes it a welcome rather than a receipt, and most businesses withhold it because they are saving material for a newsletter nobody has opened yet.

The other messages worth automating are covered in automatic emails worth setting up once.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.