What is an Onboarding Email Series?
Onboarding email series is a sequence of emails aiming to welcome your new subscriber by educating them on your product, brand or business. It is centred on letting them know about your company and having an “aha moment”.
Why is an Onboarding Series important?
An Onboarding series is important because it will allow you to make a stellar introduction to your customer. It will embed them with your brand in a deeper way than a single welcome email by focusing on creating a long-lasting relationship.
Note:
The best practices for a Welcome Email are still important when you are creating your onboarding series. Think about an Onboarding series as an extension of your single Welcome Email.
An Onboarding series is a great way to teach your audience:
- Why they should trust you & your unique selling points
- How to use your product/service or even website (where and how they can shop your looks in a current FAQ for an influencer)
- How to overcome their pain points
“A welcome series is the perfect way to introduce a new subscriber to your brand. They’re new here. Take a minute to bring them up to speed on all the awesome things you do. You can use your welcome series to showcase the best you have to offer. Share your top pieces of content, give a ton of value, and show that you’re here to help.” Sarah Anderson, Pro Email Copy
Email Onboarding Series Best Practices
- Automate the process. This needs to be the first point as it will help you maximise your time. Similar to a Welcome Email, you won’t need to send a manual message every time a subscriber joins your list. Once you have defined your welcome series, you should create an automated flow that will trigger when a new subscriber is added to your mailing list (or segment on your mailing list).
- Start with a welcoming message. The first email just simply thanks them to subscribe and should be sent immediately after they sign up. In this email, you should also include what they can expect to see from you in their inboxes and set expectations for what is coming.
- Focus on your goals. The following email campaigns should focus on a goal each. For example: getting to know your brand, what you have to offer them, sharing a case study or suggesting interesting blog content or even make a conversion. Each campaign should have a clear goal and a single call to action to help with conversion and focus.
“Choose the one most important action you want the reader to take. Make it the clear next step after reading the email. If there are multiple actions you want a subscriber to take, write multiple emails in your series to guide the reader through that journey.” – Sarah Anderson, Pro Email Copy
- How long should it be? Around 4-6 emails are ideal as you need to have enough touchpoints to build trust and show your expertise. As each email will focus on a specific goal, you can create both focussed and quality content for each one of your outreaches.
- The cadence of your emails. You don’t want to overwhelm your new subscribers with multiple emails at once. Always look into your email calendar to see if it makes sense to a new subscriber to get any of your other email campaigns while on the welcome series and if no, pause any other emails till they complete the welcome series.
- Ask about their preferences. An important part of being a content creator is to tailor your content to different buyer personas. Asking about your new subscriber preferences on your onboarding series will allow you to tailor the rest of your email marketing campaigns to their persona in order to increase conversations.
- Add an element of interactivity to your email campaigns to improve engagement and make your audience excited about your campaigns. You can add a poll, a quiz, a countdown, a tutorial or guide,… at the end you should be able to also use the results to get to know your audience better in order to create better conversions.
- Track results and A/B test. Looking into data and testing different variations are essential for a successful email strategy. A/B test to get the maximum results and keep an eye on the insights to check if you should reduce the length of your onboarding series and your audience preferences.
