How To Get The Most Out Of Your Welcome Email Funnel
Welcome emails are a thing of the past! Now, before you jump down my throat and throw me to the wolves, let me elaborate: The days of sending one welcome email and checking the box for your manager are over.
A fully blown-up welcome email funnel – yes, with all the fanfare, trappings, bells and whistles – is where we’re at in the email marketing game! But the question begs, how do you get the most out of your welcome email funnel?
Before we answer that vital question, let’s back up a moment and unpack what a welcome email funnel is. Once we have that down pat, we can delve deep into the belly of a welcome email funnel.
Use The Welcome Funnel As An Opportunity To Build Trust
A welcome funnel begins when someone signs up for your email marketing list. They give you their trust (i.e., their email address), whereas you provide them a service. That service can be a plethora of things. I should mention that this service of yours can also have a price tag associated with it.
Think back to when a business confidant gave you their business card. They were consenting to hear from you – to a certain degree. Of course, if they became not interested in your service you would leave them alone. The same goes for email, so the key to a solid welcome funnel is to treat it as a nurturing plan – even if someone bought from you right out of the gate.
Map Out A Few Flows That Make “Cents”
I love the English language and the use of homophones – like that one in the title. Naturally, I’m coaching my clients to communicate what makes sense but also dollars and cents. On the sensability front, think about sending messages and ideas like how to use this service, what are the benefits of this program, and so on. You might also want to sprinkle in some juicy testimonials. With your revenue generating hat on, you’ll want to pitch ideas like customers who bought X also enjoyed Y, or give a free shipping coupon for their second purchase.
The reason that we cannot shy away from selling in our welcome email funnels is because time is working against us. You see, if time is on the X-axis and the Y-axis is represented by the ability to make a conversion, then the more you venture out on the X-axis the lower your chance of making money is.
Now granted outliers do exist, but let’s say someone is thinking about a vacation and interested in a guidebook. They will look high and low for that guidebook until a certain point. And that point is probably just before their trip. After all, nobody wants to read up on the trip of a lifetime after they were just there.
Do Not Go Too Wide
So now we can think conceptionally and place our new sign-ups into various buckets. Do not go too wide; you can even start with just a paid customer vs. a free member email flow. These are classic splits, but you can also decide to fine-tune things according to demographic splits, but the bottom line is you want your best money-making emails at the beginning of your welcome email funnel – front-and-center.
And after you isolate your top emails – in terms of RPM (revenue per mille) – you will want to put those right at the beginning of your welcome funnel. So always be on the lookout when you are sending your newsletters. Essentially, that should be one of your main goals of sending out newsletter emails. That is, use your regular daily or weekly email to figure out which type of creative, language, bonus, sale, or who-knows-what makes your customer tick. And when have that in your field of vision, capture and safely bump it up to your welcome email funnel.
If you do this review periodically, keep iterating on your best creatives, and proving your hypothesis, then you’ll be able to successfully dress up your bland welcome email funnel into one slick, well-oiled selling machine.
