Email Marketing Best Practices: The Welcome Email Is Vital but Still Under-Used
What kind of greeting do your new subscribers get? A warm one? A cold one? Or none at all?
Email marketing vendors Smith-Harmon and Responsys released their joint Retail Welcome Email Benchmark Study earlier this month, with good news and bad news about how well the email marketing industry is doing when it comes to using the welcome email. Some of the stats are admittedly surprising.
For example, only 76% of the retailers surveyed sent out welcome emails. That’s only three-quarters! A welcome email is easy and powerful, it starts building your relationship with your subscriber and gives you a chance to up-sell or cross-sell. Can someone give us a good reason not to do a welcome email?
Two more surprising stats from the study:
- 23% of retailers took more than 24 hours to send out their welcome emails–A welcome email should be prompt, giving the subscriber confidence that they made a smart choice when signing up
- Only 76% explained the benefits of being a subscriber–Again, this is about confidence. An email signup is akin to money, because a value is being exchanged: An email address is being handed over to you in exchange for something. Help the subscriber feel good about the decision to trust you with their email address
- Only 87% included a link to their homepage—The welcome email’s primary purpose is to instill trust and get the relationship off to a good start. But you can still doing some marketing! That’s why you include a link back to your Web site
Now for some good news, areas where email marketing best practices are improving:
- More than 89% of retailers sent HTML welcome emails (instead of text), a 20% increase since 2006
- More than 68% of retailers’ welcome emails asked to be added to a subscriber’s address book, a 19% increase since 2006
If these stats don’t mean anything to you, you as an email marketer can learn a lot about the value and impact of welcome emails by just paying attention to those you personally receive. For example, one of the ClickMail team signed up for Staples Rewards program and received a welcome email…two weeks later. Despite the lag and the awkward subject line (“Welcome. And thanks for joining.”), Staples did send a welcome email and it does a lot of things right. Their welcome email:
- Asks to be added to address book (with compelling text even: “Don’t miss the savings”)
- Is branded
- Reminds the recipient what they’ll get as a Staples Rewards member
- Links to the Web site so the recipient can buy, buy, buy
- Uses alt text for the images
- Includes contact information in case there are questions
- Includes an unsubscribe link
Our favorite part of the email is this line: “Some of our best offers are sent by email. Add Staples to your address book.” Good reminder that one wants to get these emails, for the best offers.
The Smith-Harmon/Responsys study shows us where we still need to improve in the email marketing industry. But so do the welcome emails sent out by our fellow email marketers.
You can download the study at http://www.smith-harmon.com/.
Tags: email marketing best practices, email marketing vendors