Tie those subscribers down quickly

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on August 09, 2007

welcomeChad White has been addressing the topic of welcome messages, recently, through his work monitoring retailer emails. His newest article at MediaPost looks at the timing of the first email.

That's a follow-up to his onboarding article about the first email messages a new subscriber sees. And his EEC colleagues addressed the topic recently, as mentioned yesterday.

Why is this subject important?

After someone adds their name to your list, there are various things you can do. In the bad old days, we just did nothing. The newcomer got the next email scheduled to go out.

Then we learnt about the value of a suitable welcome message, sent immediately after sign-up.

The next level up is to go beyond the single welcome email and map out a series of initial emails specifically designed to address new subscribers before they get thrown in with the rest.

So why make the effort?
  1. New subscribers are not familiar with your standard emails, so you can educate them on what to expect
  2. By definition, they just had a positive interaction with your business (which is why they signed up.) So you already won part of the attention battle, and they're in a better frame of mind to respond to your messages than your average subscriber. Now might be the time to bring out your best offers.
  3. People open emails for many reasons, but one biggie is their previous experience with the sender. Because of 2. above, your first emails are more likely to get opened than is normally the case. Give them a great initial experience with your emails and they'll remember that when scrolling down their inbox in future months.
  4. The next standard email might be a while off and you need to keep them engaged until they enter the normal message flow.
That's why.

P.S. Looking through the archives, Anna Billstrom wrote a nice piece with an example email marketing starter package here. And Whitney Hutchinson also addressed the topic in the context of a wider contact plan.

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