If there’s one thing I love, it’s low hanging marketing fruit. So often, the most rudimentary marketing campaigns can have huge impacts on the bottom line of a business. One of our favourite examples of this is the humble Welcome Campaign. This is the series of emails you send your customers after they’ve given you their contact info. It’s your way of welcoming them to your brand, and what you choose to include sets the tone for every interaction you’ll have with them.
1. It’s more about quality than quantity.
The top-performing welcome campaign had only two emails in the entire series, while the second and third campaigns had twice and three times as many, respectively. This illustrates an important point: there is no magic number of emails or steps that make a perfect welcome flow. What works best for your brand might not work best for your competitor. Start simple, with one or two emails, and increase as necessary rather than sending emails just for the sake of sending emails.
2. Allow yourself to introduce...yourself.
Welcome campaigns need to introduce people to your brand. There were a few excellent examples of this. One brand used the second email in their welcome series to talk about why the founder had started the company. Two of the brands included a personalised letter from the CEO explaining their mission and purpose. This is the time to show off the things that make your brand what it is.
3. Social proof is good.
Another great way to show off your brand’s mission and purpose are to include some form of social proof in your campaign. In the same way that you probably look at reviews when you’re online shopping to see what other people are saying, social proof shows your customers what your current customers are saying about your offerings. There are a few ways you can accomplish this, but if you have positive reviews to leverage, this is the time to display them.
4. Give your customers some space.
One commonality between every campaign we looked at was that there were 1-5 day breaks in between each email. These could be anywhere from a day to a week, but the majority of customers were waiting two to three days between sending emails in their series. Spacing out your messages means fewer chances for your customers to get email fatigue. Don’t make people regret subscribing or worse, give them a reason to unsubscribe.
5. Include all of your traffic sources.
You likely have several places that people can give you their information and become a subscriber. From email forms to social ads, make sure every source of traffic is accounted for in your welcome campaign so that the experience is consistent across sources. CDP/CRM platforms allows you to add an unlimited number of automatically-triggered traffic sources, so use this to your advantage to create the most holistic campaign possible.
6. Reward your new subscribers with a discount code.
Three of the five campaigns offered their new subscribers a 10% discount code (or a link). This is a pretty standard practice among ecommerce marketers. Only one brand chose not to offer a discount in any form. The final brand offered new customers a special bundle of items and included free shipping as an introduction to their product. There are a couple of takeaways here: offering some kind of discount is good (although not necessary), but if you don’t want to go the discount code route, you have other options. Get creative!
7. What happens when someone makes a purchase?
If your welcome campaign is successful, you have two options. You can, of course, keep people in the welcome campaign, which about half of the campaigns did. If you want to take your campaign to the next level, consider setting up goals within your workflows to remove people who make purchases, and put them into a post-purchase flow instead. This is another low-hanging fruit marketing campaign that we love.