Oct 29, 20236 min read

Curating a Powerful Welcome Email Sequence

Creating a solid first impression, especially in the email world, can often mean the difference between success and failure.

Person writing welcome in cursive on a brown envelope

The start of a beautiful friendship

Picture this: A potential customer walks into your store or visits your website. What do you do? You greet them warmly, offer assistance, and provide them with a glimpse of what your brand is all about.

The same principle applies to your email welcome sequence 💡

It's your virtual storefront, your digital handshake, and your way of saying, "You're more than just a subscriber—you're part of our community."

A well-structured email welcome sequence lays this foundation, setting you up for far better future engagement.

Today we're going to break down something that may look familiar to you: The Email Advice in Your Inbox Welcome series.

This is probably our most in-depth breakdown yet, so we're hoping it helps you! Buckle up and let's see how you can use our principles to begin curating a powerful welcome email sequence of your own.

A golden bell sitting on an ornate wooden reception desk

Setting up your Welcome email sequence

Your Welcome email sequence isn't simply about creating a good-looking, welcoming email. As with strategising every email you curate, you want to ideally begin by laying a solid foundation.

How?

We're going to list 5 quick considerations to keep in mind when creating your Welcome journey, but it's critical that these principles are applied to the journey as a whole.

You may choose to only have a single Welcome email or a series of ten. What you'll inevitably need for success is a golden thread, of sorts 🧵

These principles act as exactly that and lay the foundation we've alluded to above.

Let's begin with those and dive into our Welcome sequence thereafter, covering what you can do to bolster yours.

Principles for Welcome Email Success

Care About Your Audience: Right from the outset, show your audience you care. You do this by putting their interests first, respecting their data and ensuring you always keep their needs above yours when in their inbox. People notice when you don't.
Leave An Impression: How do you want to be remembered? I'm not waxing philosophical here, but this is the number one determinant of how your future emails will be thought of and, in many cases, engaged with. Engagement is your most crucial email success factor. Look after it.
Deliver Value: Each email in your sequence should offer something valuable to your subscribers. Whatever your strategy and however long your email sequence is, make sure there's something of value in it for your audience. Envoke the Principle of Reciprocity and win trust.
Be Human: Let's face it: We're all served with overly-robotic transactional messages all the damn time 🙄 You know how you stand out? Be human. This means showing a face, flashing a smile, talking as if to a friend and not merely treating your welcome as a formality. Your audience will want to hear from you again.
Clear Call to Action: Guide your subscribers toward the next step you want them to take. Whether it's exploring your products, signing up for a webinar, or following you on social media, make your call to action explicit and enticing. They're going to take action. Make sure it's the action you want it to be.

Person waving with shadow of the wave cast on green wall

Email 1 - The Warm Welcome (Day 1)

This email is the first email you send as soon as someone joins your list (or buys your product, starts a service, etc, you get the idea).

The intention? Besides welcoming your audience, which should ideally be done warmly and meaningfully, you want to give them the incentive they signed up for.

If you don't have an incentive, that's also okay, but don't make it difficult for a new subscriber to access what you've promised, if you've promised them something.

As you'll have seen in your welcome email when signing up, here are a quick few tips:

Ensure they know who is sending the email
Express gratitude towards your new sign-ups
Make their gift or incentive clear and accessible
Keep it straightforward before they scroll further down

Here's how we've implemented these principles:

Email Advice in Your Inbox - Welcome sequence example 1

Next up, we focus on setting expectations and showing your readers you put them first. Here's what we did to nail these two principles down:

Set clear, concise expectations
Reminded them why they signed up in the first place
Showed readers we care about their inboxes and email preferences

You can see this in action here:

Email Advice in Your Inbox - Welcome sequence example 2

Lastly, we let readers know we mean business.

It may sound strange, but let people know you have something to sell right in the beginning. That way, if you pitch your product or service in future emails, it is expected and received far better.

Here's what we did:

Make certain readers know about our Expert Guide
Let them know the benefits of what we sell
Put a face to the name so you can see who'll be sending future emails

We believe this formula works. Why? Well, our friend Albert (sign up for his emails here) gave us this amazing feedback:

Testimonial about the Email Advice in Your Inbox welcome email sequence

We're pretty proud of that one 💌

Email 2 - The Value Add (Day 5)

The next email in your series can, like ours, be designed purely as a value-add. This may seem pointless, but this email is an insane opportunity to get audience feedback!

We'll discuss feedback shortly, but this email is a great gauge of retained audience members.

Remember, if you run an amazing incentive, you'll most likely always find a few folks who merely sign up to get their hands on your incentive. They then either ghost your emails or leave, so readers who've stayed beyond this point are likely serious subscribers.

Treat them well!

Our Feedback Hypothesis Explained

The idea is to have two distinct ways of collecting feedback, either actively or passively.

Active feedback is either a survey or a preference update.

Passive feedback, however, is inferring feedback based on reader actions. Usually, these are clicks.

In the case of part 2 of our welcome email, here's how we received your feedback:

Created an unexpected value-add and linked it to our blog
Addressed possible pain points that our audience members experience
Asked clearly for active feedback
Collected passive feedback by looking at pain-point clicks in this email

This is a great way to learn which topics resonate with your audience, guiding your future email strategy.

Here's how we implemented these principles in the emails you'll have seen (or will see if you hit this link to join our community🔮):

Email Advice in Your Inbox - Welcome sequence example 3

You can see the clear value added and the specific topics chosen as potential pain points. These are passive feedback points for us to collect.

Next, we're asking for active feedback, with a clear action attached to this.

Lastly, you'll notice a link to send the Database Growth Playbook to a friend. This provides a clear way for folks to share their resources with people they know, creating an avenue for further database growth.

Here is this part of the email in action:

Email Advice in Your Inbox - Welcome sequence example 4

It doesn't have to be complicated!

Try to address a potential problem your readers face before they bring it up, give them a helpful solution and learn from their engagement.

Email 3 - Closing the Loop (Day 12)

The final email in your welcome series, be it email 2 or email 10, should be designed to close the loop.

We believe in leading with ongoing value, so we've thrown in a few practical external resources here, to ensure we're not simply punting just our own work.

The intention here is to reaffirm in a reader's mind that they've made the right choice signing up, reaffirm the value they'll receive in future and, lastly, remind them of what you sell.

Again, you can see this in our final welcome email here:

Email Advice in Your Inbox - Welcome sequence example 5

Each email in this sequence serves a specific purpose.

This will vary based on what you're sending, what your business or brand does and how you want to kick off the journey with your subscribers.

PS - Timing is (almost) irrelevant.

You'll notice our sequence takes 12 days, but you can shorten this or lengthen it based on your strategy. Mix it up and test what works best for you. There are no hard and fast rules, just make sure you stay in your readers' minds.