A solid welcome program forms the foundation for any successful automated email campaign, but is often overlooked.
It looks like many marketers need to return to the basics and think about how beneficial welcome programs can be for both the sender and the receiver. Recent studies show that welcome emails usually have an open rate of over 50% (source: Econsultancy). However, only 57 percent of companies actually send them! (source: Marketingprofs).
It’s polite to say thank you
If someone handed you a gift in person, your immediate response would be to thank them – the same goes for online interactions. When someone takes the time to purchase your product, use your service, or sign up for your newsletter, it’s only courteous to express your gratitude.
This enables the relationship with your customer/prospect to start on a really positive note and facilitates a more fluid, continuous dialogue as opposed to simply sending monthly generic batch and blast emails. It’s also important to note that the point of sign up is when recipients are at their most receptive so it really is the right time to reach out and solidify the relationship!
Enrich your data
As well as being the right thing to do from a commercial point of view a welcome program can be a hugely critical exercise in terms of learning more about your recipients as it can provide you with a second chance at data capture. It’s common practice to include a survey or form in this early correspondence, making it easy to gain as much insight as possible.
Adapting your welcome survey into the style of a preference centre is also a quick and easy way to drive engagement and inspire trust as it ensures your ongoing emails are valuable, timely, personalized and relevant to the recipient.
So why wouldn’t you send a welcome program?
From our experience when we broach the subject of welcome programs with clients everyone is usually in agreement that it makes sense, but there is always one overriding objection – lack of time and resource. If putting together a welcome program is going to be a strain on your time, you are not using the correct email platform! A powerful ESP such as dotmailer comprises tools that can take all the manual labour out of such initiatives – building not only automated welcome programs, but whole lifecycles!