What is a welcome email? How does it benefit a SaaS marketing strategy? What is a good welcome email example? We answer these here
Welcome emails help start building a relationship with the customer as soon as they join your website or subscribe to it. In this article, we discuss what a welcome email is, why it adds value to your marketing strategy and how to create great engaging welcome emails illustrated with examples. This content will benefit SaaS companies owners, marketers, designers and especially email marketers.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is one of the most successful communication platforms for businesses. It belongs to online marketing and implies product or service promotion via this means of communication. Any email sent out to a customer, besides when it's two-way communication like issue resolution, can be considered email marketing in action. Besides promotion, emails crafted for marketing purposes can also serve as newsletters and announcements.
Why is email marketing important?
Overall, the goal of emails is to increase conversion in your SaaS marketing. This can be achieved through bringing traffic to your website or blog, keeping customers engaged between purchases, introducing new products to your audience and building loyalty with new, potential or existing customers.
With this being said, email is a powerful marketing tool, sometimes even more beneficial than other means of communication with your audience. Here's why:
email marketing is significantly cost-effective — you get a 3,600% ROI for each $1 spent while there are tools for any budget, including free services
multi-purpose marketing channel — email marketing can be used to welcome new customers, introduce new products, send reminders, offer limited discounts, make announcements, etc.
fewer limits in terms of age groups — email is accessible to the majority of Internet users, which leads to a bigger audience
email segmentation — you can manipulate the target audience selection to deliver a message to the desired recipients
good audience reach — a customer is 5 times more likely to see your message if it's sent via email as opposed to social media
simple and affordable scalability — you can send the same email to more and more people as your business expands
find the best-performing emails — A/B testing allows identifying the main email trends among your audience and sticking to the most successful wordings, media and templates
With all the advantages email marketing provides, you create a personalized approach to your audience and build a relationship with each customer, which leads to more sales in the long run.
What is a welcome email?
A welcome email is an email a person receives after registering at a company's website, completing the first purchase or subscribing to a company's newsletter. Welcome emails belong to transactional emails, meaning that these are sent to a customer automatically after a trigger, like those listed.
Welcome emails are different from promotional emails because they are aimed at setting a foundation for your relationship with a customer and introducing the product to them.
10 benefits of welcome email for SaaS
Just as other types of emails, welcome letters are an effective asset to add to your go-to marketing strategy as a SaaS company. And here are the 10 things welcome emails do to strengthen your marketing efforts.
1. Have great open rates
Welcome letters are the most successful kind of email among all: they have a 5 times higher click rate than emails of other types. In fact, welcome emails are usually expected after completing such actions as signing up or subscribing. So with the right timing, they kind of continue the dialog between the company and the customer that started with the action of the latter.
2. Get you the first customer’s ‘Yes’
Welcome emails provide an opportunity to get a customer to say their 'yes' to you for the first time. This can be something very subtle, like visiting your website after signing up, checking out your latest publications or finishing up their profile — these are all free and simple actions recipients are likely to perform with a clear CTA. Anyway, your welcome message is a great way to start your conversation with a new user before proceeding to hard sales.
3. Keep the momentum going
The moment when a person subscribes is when they are interested in your content the most. That's why time matters with welcome mail — they are ready to learn more about your business and engage with your content. So sending out a welcome email with an overview of what your product can offer and calling the reader to action will likely result in them taking further steps to move through the customer journey you’ve set up for them.
4. Introduce your means of communication
Sending out an email with information on the next steps to someone who’s just signed up shows that email is one of the ways they can reach you or expect you to reach them. Just like with onboarding emails for when a new person joins your company, a timely greeting letter adds clarity and shows how you run your communication and overall, do business.
5. Encourage purchase
Providing a discount code in your welcome letter increases your chances of making a sale. But you can be more subtle and still get the user to buy from you. By sharing information about your product and the value it brings, you explain how it can be useful to the reader. Without directly selling, such blocks as client testimonials or reviews added to the email can really shape the person's desire to move through the funnel and come closer to making a purchase.
6. Increase awareness of your brand
Transactional email sending, like welcome letters, doesn’t only educate the newly registered customer on your software but also on who you are as a company, your history and your expertise. While this doesn't have to be a lengthy introduction, just mentioning a few things about your SaaS business will establish trust and help the recipient remember the name and vibe of your brand.
7. Bring more traffic to your existing content
In your first email to the customer, you should include some great media to capture their attention. That's when you can use the content you've already created and get more traffic to it while keeping the reader engaged. Another way to kill two birds with one stone is directing the new subscriber to your existing blog series, most recent or popular publications.
8. Set the tone of your future relationship
The first email helps set the tone for your further communication and the entire relationship with your customer. So use personal messages and emotional appeal to warm up your way to the recipient’s heart. Don't go overboard with politeness but wish them well so that they go on with their day bearing a nice impression from becoming a user of your service.
9. Improve customer segmentation
The person's response to the welcome email brings a lot of information. Regardless of whether they act upon it or not, you can use this info for segmentation. In turn, this allows for further targeting the person with relevant content and improving their experience with your company to increase their loyalty and lead them to make a purchase.
10. Reduce unsubscribe rates
By sending out an email, you let the person know that they can expect to get emails from you and will not be surprised with the promotional letters you send them later. In fact, they can even become primed up and interested in getting those. So making it clear from the start that sending emails is something your business does secures your reputation as a sender, reducing the chances of your emails being considered spam or just annoying and worth unsubscribing.
Best tools for welcome email design
You can come across lots of tools for email template designing out there, for all budgets and needs. But some of them have become the go-to choices, like the following:
HubSpot Email Marketing Tools is a service for email campaign creation. With this one, you can easily design an appealing welcome email using templates provided while adjusting it to different recipients for better conversion rates. Tools for analytics and reporting are provided, too. You can start with a free plan to try it out and upgrade to one of the paid plans to access more features.
Mailchimp offers a wide variety of templates for your emails, including welcome letters, so you can easily get started using simple drag-and-drops to customize them. Besides, third-party integrations allow you to do most of your marketing in one place. There are both free and paid plans.
Mosaico is a completely free tool for email designing that offers great flexibility in customizing your responsive emails. You can create your own templates and adjust them to your target audience using the service’s simple and intuitive UI.
Welcome email: Templates and examples
To master greeting letters to your new customers, you have to test out various designs on your audience. But any good sample of a welcome email follows the following structure:
1. Impactful subject line. An eye-catching subject line plays a crucial role in grabbing customers' attention, increasing open rates and developing further interest of your audience. This is when A/B testing comes to help — run different options to find the most clickable one.
2. Introduction of your business. Start your email with a company's logo or the name of the sender who’s writing on behalf of the company. The recipients shouldn't be confused about who the letter is from and spend time looking around to figure it out.
3. Welcome the customer. Take a line or several to welcome the recipient. You can even express your appreciation for the customer's subscription or registration. Use media or just word this in a short note right after your company's name to let them grasp the purpose of your email right away.
4. Add useful information. Help the customer get started with your software, share guides and recommend what to read or pages to check out on your website. You can also include information about your company and product, what value it brings to them and how they can purchase it.
5. Include CTAs. Add a clear, relevant and easy-to-spot call-to-action to direct the customer to take the next step. Buttons work great to make a CTA stand out among other text and media. If your email is rather long and consists of several parts with different purposes, you may need to add several CTAs, each to match the content of every block. But don't overdo it — 1 to 3 buttons is enough.
6. Link your social media. By adding links to your social media, you show your online presence to the customer, allow them to explore more of your content and reach out to you via their preferred channel of communication. So be sure to include your links to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks you're active on.
Examples from top brands
Here are some great welcome emails from leading SaaS companies to get you inspired.
Notice that they all start with a logo, provide valuable information on the product’s features, have CTA, share social media and use emotional appeal.
Twitch and Wix: The welcome letters from both companies are short and straight to the point. Even though they are quite succinct, they do the job perfectly: introduce the products in the beginning, lead to a CTA next and describe the capabilities of the services last.
GoDaddy, Jira and Trello: All these aim their emails at providing help to the newly registered users — they share the next steps to take to get started and guides to refer to. The introductions are short, informative and followed by a CTA button. GoDaddy even features a 20% discount for the newbie, which is great for getting a sale right away.
Additionally, the images keep the emails fun and illustrative.
Pitch and Canva: These two follow the same template — starting with the short engaging intros, they’re worded to share what the products are about. They then transition into the clear and simple CTA. Next, relative images are followed by more details on the features the services offer, creating clearly structured, visually appealing and informative letters.
Email design mistakes to avoid
You can experiment with the design, wording and media layout of your welcome emails as much as you need to find the perfect template. But make sure to avoid making these most common mistakes that may end up killing the potential of your letter:
1. Corrupted links
2. Hard to spot CTA
3. Too much text and/or media
4. Bad image-text ratio
5. Not testing the email in different clients
6. No ‘Unsubscribe’ option
Wrapping up
Greeting your customers after they join your website, use your service for the first time or subscribe to your newsletter is a powerful email marketing effort. There are many benefits to using welcome emails, but keep in mind that they need to follow a particular structure to be effective in generating sales, building long-term relationships with customers and raising awareness of your brand.
