74.4% consumers expect a welcome email when they signup to a new list. You can leverage on welcome emails to welcome your users on-board and also sow a seed for user engagement.

According to a study, new subscribers are the most engaged within first 48 hours. Sadly, the same study shows 41% of brands did not send any welcome messages within the first 48 hours of subscribing.

Welcome messages typically have 4 times the open rate and 5 times the click-through-rate of other bulk mailings. Even then, many brands fail to leverage this opportunity.

Welcome email is an effective email marketing tactic that has the potential to build 33% more long-term brand engagement with the new users. You don’t need an additional tactic to guide new users to use your product or service.

In this article, we discuss email marketing best practices that are required to draft an effective welcome email, when a new user joins your app.

#1 Use a real name in the from field

Sender names are more prominent than subject lines when checking for email on the mobile device.

Use a real name in the ‘From’ field, as this is the first email your app users will be receiving once they have signed in.

For example, imagine an email from corporate@xyz.com and Ben@xyz.com. Users will connect to the latter as it has a human name.

The Vero blog’s email marketing campaign has welcome emails that don’t come from a corporate generic email ID, instead comes from the Co-founder and CEO of Vero, Chris Hexton and at the same time establishes the brand – the ‘From Field’ displays ‘Chris from Vero’. This immediately helps the users to recall their Vero subscription. They have an average open rate of 47%.

#2 Provide onboarding tips

Approximately 25% of subscribers do not engage with a brand because they are not on-boarded correctly.

That means 1/4^th of your users are instantly lost at the get go because they were not guided properly about the usage and the use case(s) of your mobile app.

Welcome emails are a great medium to provide onboarding tips to your new app users. You can hand-hold the user and offer tips so they get the most out of your app.

Use hyperlinks, a demo or explainer video, or images to guide the user. Here’s an inspiration for onboarding:

Inbox, the new email experience by Gmail sends the above welcome email to its subscribers. Since it was an invite-only service and not many people knew about it, Gmail used the FAQ approach along with a video, to make it clear how the product works and gets users excited to try it out immediately.

#3 Invite users to email you

Welcome emails aren’t signup receipts. Your welcome email shouldn’t be the dead end of your conversation with your new users.

For an effective email marketing campaign, don’t just welcome the users but also give them the next step. End your welcome email with a call-to-action or initiate a conversation.

Striking a conversation will be your first step towards maximising conversion rates. There is no harm in asking the subscribers to take a moment to reply with any queries.

OkDork is Noah Kagan’s personal marketing blog. When users signup for the blog, they get a welcome mail from Noah which reads like an email from a friend.

To encourage a reply from subscribers, Noah asks a question which everyone would like to answer. This question is so vague that it has no definite answer and hence all kind of users can get involved in this conversation.

#4 Make subject lines actionable

Consider subject lines as the captain of the ship; they decide which way your email will go: open, delete or spam. Engage your new users to open the email by sending a promo code, or a discount for your paid services.

For example “Welcome to our App, Get 15% off now on premium services!” is a compelling one.

Nir Eyal’s blog on behaviour engineering, Nirandfar, gets straight to business with this actionable subject line.

#5 Personalize the email

If there’s one important email marketing tip that we’d give out, it would be – personalize the email with user’s name.

Let them know that you’re emailing them personally, rather than an automated mass mailer (even if it is one). You can extend this logic in your sign-off as well, where you have a personal sign-off.

Use the welcome email to get more information on your new users’ preferences, which will further help you in segmentation for sending push-notifications.

This technique is known as ‘progressive profiling.’ It’s a proven way to not only get more detailed information from your users, but also to do it in a way that doesn’t turn them off.

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