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Hey, Everyone likes to feel special. Nice hotels, for example, go to great lengths to make everyone feel welcome because they know it sets the tone for the guest experience to follow. While you won’t physically greet readers as they join your mailing list – one sincerely hopes! – there are lots of things you can do to make the experience more personal, and maybe even fun. Doing so is important because reader behavior during the welcome sequence often determines their performance over time too. In other words, if you successfully warm readers up on entry, they will stay hot over time: opening, clicking, buying, liking, reviewing, and sharing. But if they start off cold, or if interest dissipates during your welcome sequence, then you will likely see performance fade over time, with that cohort of readers slipping off your list of reliable openers, clickers, and buyers. With this in mind, over the next few newsletters we are going to break down the welcome sequence in great detail. Here’s what I plan to cover:
- Importance of a good welcome
- How to actually construct a welcome sequence on Kit and MailerLite (and maybe some alternatives like EmailOctopus – let’s see).
- Common mistakes to avoid
- Advanced welcome sequence moves like video, custom welcomes, tagging and segmenting, and then when you might engage in list optimization post-welcome too.
Back to examining our red carpet. We often focus on performance from one newsletter to the next but, in truth, the range of possible results are often baked in during the onboarding of each individual reader. I’m not suggesting that your welcome sequence is the only thing that matters. But if a reader graduates from onboarding happy, interested, and engaged then they will likely stay that way over time (if you keep in touch regularly and continue to share interesting content between those launches). But if your welcome sequence doesn’t do its job, you will find it a lot harder to keep those readers engaged. Let’s put it even more plainly: the better your welcome sequence performs, the better your list will perform. measuring performanceThere are a few different ways to look at this but, for me, open rates are still the most useful metric. The way to determine something amorphous like “reader interest” is to map it to a real-world trackable action – which is why we talk about “engagement” because we can measure that through trackable actions like opens and clicks. I aim to have the open rate on my first welcome email as high as humanly possible. There will invariably be a drop in open rates on the next email, and the one after that, and so on. But my overall aim is to minimize those drops as much as I can so that readers graduate from my welcome sequence as engaged as possible. Of course, open rates are an imperfect metric and opens won’t lead to sales all on their own anyway. I also want to see clicks, and I certainly won’t waste the opportunity to generate sales with my welcome sequence either. But readers have little chance of buying if they don’t click. And they certainly can’t click if they never open the email in the first place… so that’s my primary focus. Besides, if readers stop opening, I know that has various technical effects. It dings my sender reputation with important entities like Gmail and will ultimately act as a drag on deliverability over time. If that gets out of hand, it can even start impacting the delivery of emails to still-engaged readers, creating a vicious circle with my open rates and list health. We’re going to drill down now and look at the specific jobs that your welcome sequence should perform but let’s just restate why a good welcome sequence matters so we have that as our lodestar:
- Performance during the welcome sequence largely determines performance over time.
- Onboard readers well and you set yourself up to have a high-performing list.
job of welcome matNow that we have a good handle on why the welcome sequence matters, let’s sketch out those discrete tasks we want it to perform so we reach those goals. 1. deliver freebieDangling a freebie to encourage sign-ups is a long-established tactic and I probably don’t have to make the case for it here. But if you have taken my advice, and that of every email expert on the planet, and are offering something to readers in exchange for their email address, then you better make absolutely sure that you deliver that freebie in a quick and seamless manner. If you don’t, you run the danger of losing their trust immediately and generating angry emails from people who feel they have been duped. And probably even more people who will just lose interest right away and ignore any future messages from you. This means that you should deliver the freebie in the very first email of your sequence. I recommend doing this directly after your subscription-confirmation email (aka the double opt-in email), rather than in that email itself as some providers recommend. Reason why: that very first email is the very first communication you have with that subscriber and the chances of it going into Spam or Promotions is higher than usual, so I like to maximize deliverability and keep the email as plain as possible. But we’ll get into those weeds further when building the actual sequences next time as each platform is a little different. Just embrace the principle of delivering the freebie as quickly as possible. 2. set expectationsEveryone likes to know the score. When delivering that magnet, tell people they are going to get a few welcome emails. Give them an overview of what to expect. The cadence of your emails will vary depending on the length of your sequence and the frequency of your regular newsletter, but you might say something like this (in your own voice, obvs): “You will get a few welcome emails over the next couple of weeks before starting to receive the monthly newsletter, which comes out on the first Friday of every month” (or whatever it happens to be – be as loose or specific as you like, just give people an idea of what to expect). Or you might say something like: “Check your inbox on Tuesday for more goodies. There will be a couple more emails to get you up to speed before you start getting the regular Sunday newsletter.” Those are very anodyne and generic examples, obviously, so most certainly adapt them to your genre and individual style of communicating… but you get the idea. Set expectations, establish the cadence, prime them to look for your emails, and to open them (and click something inside, for bonus points). 3. sell booksYour open rates are likely to be at their highest during your welcome sequence – at least some slippage is inevitable. So don’t waste the opportunity to sell people something. Besides, they have probably just finished one of your books and need something to read! And if you did your job with the story well enough, they will be very predisposed to read something else of yours, especially if it is set in the same world or features the same characters – or is in the same niche. When you get fancier with your welcome sequences you can have custom ones depending on how people joined your list, which will affect which book or series you push them towards. For example, if people joined from something like a Facebook Ad, a swap, or a giveaway, then pushing them towards your main series is the move – highlighting that cheap/free Book 1 specifically, if applicable. You want to minimize buying friction with colder subscribers in particular. But if someone is coming in after the final book of your primary series, then pushing them to a spin-off series will get better results. This is where custom sequences can really deliver results. When starting out though, or when you are on a plan that only allows one automation anyway, then you need something that works for all types of sign-ups. In this case, I’d still focus on the main series, talk about the first couple of books, and mention any spin offs, to cover all bases. But you can play around with the content, see what people are responding to, and adjust accordingly. 4. graduate with high opensAs discussed above, it’s imperative that your subscribers maintain engagement throughout your sequence, and open rates remain the best way to measure that, despite the limitations of that metric. You must try to minimize the open rate drops between each email in your sequence. An open rate drop can be caused by a few different things. (a) Subject line – this is quite a big one. If the subject line isn’t interesting, readers might not open, especially if they are colder subscribers who haven’t fallen in love with your words yet. You can manually test alternatives to see if that improves your open rate. Some providers have split testing tools built in too. (You will get better at this with experience as well.) (b) Newsletter content – this is less immediate than subject lines because a duff email will likely affect the open rate of the next email in the sequence. You’ll have to use some judgment here, but you’ll also get a sense from reader replies and things like click data. If you have a nagging feeling that one particular email is the weak link in the chain, and the open rate drops on the next email in the sequence, then punching up the content or replacing it with something else might do the trick. (c) Deliverability issues – if you are confident in your content and subject lines then it might simply be a deliverability issue.
- Is there a spammy word in your subject line?
- Or something like an exclamation point which Gmail can flip out about?
- Do you have too many buttons or images?
- Is your formatting too fussy?
- Are your images too big?
- Did you test the emails in a free tool like Mail Tester and address any highlighted issues?
Deliverability is a huge topic all on its own, but those are the common ones that can drop an email into Spam or Promotions. Remember, before you have established a relationship with each subscriber, the filters are much more sensitive. some adviceThere’s a lot to digest here, but don’t be overwhelmed. You don’t need to get all this right before you start growing your list. My welcome sequences were honed over time – and you need time anyway to gather data and measure subscribers’ responses to any changes. Consider it a bunch of opportunities to improve performance that you can work through, rather than an urgent to do list. We’ll get into the weeds next time. Dave P.S. Writing music this week is France Gall and Il jouait le piano debout. |
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