Email Welcome Series Development on Mailchimp

Create an Email Welcome Series

Let the pros program and design your first welcome series of emails. Leveraging our decade+ of experience, we can create in days what would take you months to build your first time. 

After you subscribe to the basic Mailchimp account of $20/mo we will develop an email campaign system that can be managed by one person no matter the size of your email list. Once it is in place, it requires little to no maintenance and potential customers will be contacted regularly and automatically to make sure you never lose a single email that you have worked hard to obtain. 

A welcome series is a set of pre-created emails are sent to your customers at intervals that you choose. (Once a day, once every other day, once a week, month, etc.) Most entrepreneurs initially create their welcomes series with the singular intent of generating immediate sales. And while that is the goal, you don't want to hit your would-be customers too quickly and encourage them to unsubscribe. 

We will help you carefully select your intervals and carefully build each email with the customer experience in mind. 

Broadly speaking, there are two types of emails:

1. Content
2. Promotional

Content emails are built for educational purposes almost exclusively. They educate and inspire your customers to create or to learn something new. They are informative and may include information about your company, your history, your values. Content emails tend to have very high open rates and very low unsubscribe rates. But they also generate very little in sales. 

Promotional emails are the emails most entrepreneurs want to send immediately. They highlight sales, new products, promotions, deals and reasons to buy now. Promotional emails generate more in revenue than content emails, but their unsubscribe rate is high as they tend to scare away customers with their aggressive offers and "SPAM" look and feel. 

So when we build your welcomes series, it will include a soft, seamless blend of content emails and promotional emails. Of course, content emails can include sales (meaning we can and will build a hybrid of both), but you will find that most of your traffic will come from the top 1 or 2 blocks of your emails, so your prime space on top as well as the subject of your email, must be one or the other. It cannot be both. 

We will deliver to you a 21-email onboarding system that works as an effective starting point for all businesses. Developed with nearly a decade of trial-and-error applications within our own businesses. Once created, they can be left to simply do their job so you know with confidence that every email you collect will be properly utilized and the customer will be rewarded for providing you with their email. You will educate your customer, you will have low unsubscribe rates and you won't just get a first order, you will get subsequent reorders. 

Our goal is not to make one-time customers. Our goal is to make lifetime customers. 

The 21 emails can be sent daily over 3 weeks, every other day over 6 weeks or twice a week over 10 weeks. We have seen success in all three intervals. Once a week is too few to maintain "front of mind" status with your customers. We recommend daily or every other day. 

Here is how block #1 (the top block) of your welcome series emails will be structured:

1. Content: Thank you for signing up. What to expect. X% Off first purchase. 
2. Content: About our company. 
3. Content: Most popular blog article.
   1. Note: If you do not have blog articles written yet, we can write them for you for $49/article. They are a critical part of your welcome series.
4. Content: Return policies, product guarantees, why they matter.
5. Promotional: Your favorite products and why - X% Off 
6. Content: What customers think about you. Reviews. 
   
7. Promotional: Sale today (this week/month) only. 
8. Content: Blog article
9. Promotional: Product pairing Buy X get Y
10. Content: Blog article
11. Content: How we give back.
12. Promotional: Free Shipping over $X
13. Promotional: Customer favorite sales
14. Content: Blog article
15. Promotional: Have you used your sign up discount yet? (See email 1) 
16. Promotional: X% off all 1 week only
17. Content: Blog article
18. Promotional: Product pairing Buy X get Y
19. Promotional: Gift cards
20. Content: Blog article
21. Promotional: It's your 3 week anniversary - biggest offer of X% off next order. 

As you can see, we begin content heavy and then end the series more promotional heavy. Remember, great content usually results in high open rates and low unsubscribe rates, but lower sales. You're planting the seeds of loyalty in those emails. Promotional emails should provide higher revenue, but will have lower open rates and higher unsubscribe rates. 

What you are learning in the welcome series is what your customers are interested in, what deals convert into sales and how long it takes a customer to convert. Over time, you may move email number 14 to the 7th spot, or email number 4 to the 20th spot as you see how they convert. You may toss out email number 12 altogether and introduce something new. No two businesses are the same. Our goal here is to give you the starting point we wish we had when we started our first business. 

Usually, the system is set up so that when a customer makes their first purchase they are removed from the welcome series and immediately assigned to a new customer series that is shorter and more promotion heavy. That's why we offer our biggest discount at email 21. Anyone receiving email 21 hasn't purchased yet so we want to learn what it takes to get that person to buy. 

The interactions here also feed into the strategy of the new emails you create and send every week to those that have graduated from this list. The emails above will teach you what your customers are most interested in, ensuring that your regular emails are tailored to their wants and needs. 

We follow the same template above when a customer makes their first purchase and moves to the first-purchase series which is geared more towards rewarding them for their purchase, reassuring them of their decisions and inventing them to buy again. Then, using segments, we regularly reward our top customers, recurring customers and those that have remained active on our email list for extended periods of time. 

Following the 21 email system above will give you a fantastic start and ensure that not a single email is wasted. You worked too hard to get that email. Don't let them slip through the cracks.