Marketing Experiments discusses how to engage new subscribers with a sequence of emails instead of just one welcome email.

When you acquire a new subscriber, do you send out just one welcome email? Or a sequence of emails?

All too often, when someone signs up for an email list, companies simply send out one welcome email. Each new subscriber then receives the usual, scheduled emails or newsletters.

However, you can get a lot more attention from those new subscribers if you engage them more deeply with a series of welcome emails, sometimes called an autoresponder sequence.

In a recent four-month experiment, we set up a three-message welcome sequence for one of our test sites.

Here are the details:

1. The primary purpose of the welcome message sequence was to generate clickthroughs back to a page on the test site that was aimed at converting these free subscribers to premium (paying) members.
2. The sequence was triggered whenever someone signed up for a free opt-in email newsletter.
3. New subscribers received the first email immediately, the second email 24 hours later, and the third email 72 hours after sign-up.

Here are the results of our first four months of testing:

In the test above, we generated an additional 617 unique visits to our test site's offer page. All three emails generated an average clickthrough rate (CTR) of 15 percent or better.

Of the 1,335 new subscribers over the test period, 617 clicked through to view our Test Site's offer a second time. This represents 46.2 percent of the new subscribers.

In other words, you would do well to use a welcome email sequence to take advantage of the attention and interest of new subscribers.
If all you do is send out one welcome email, you are missing out on a valuable opportunity.

You'll find the full set of test results in our Welcome Message Sequence Brief

The Marketing Experiments Journal publishes primary test results from work with our research partners once every two weeks. Subscription to the Journal is free and gives you full access to both our archives and teleconference calls. Subscribe here.