How I Built a Welcome Series For My Newsletter

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The first thing I work on with any new Inbox Collective client is their welcome series. It’s a series of emails, sent automatically after someone first subscribes to your newsletter, to introduce yourself to your new readers and build a relationship with them.

A great welcome series has a few clear goals:

• It guides that reader through the next steps on their journey.
• It drives engagement from Day 1.
• It boosts your inbox placement — it actually helps you consistently get into the good parts of the inbox.
• It converts new readers to paying supporters.

Setting up a welcome series is one of the best things you can do to drive both reader engagement and reader revenue. So let’s look at one sample welcome series: The one I built for new readers to Not a Newsletter.

Email #1: The Hallmark email

This one’s called the Hallmark email because the subject line usually sounds like something you’d see on a greeting card: Hello! Welcome! Congrats! Thank you! (Mine says, “Welcome! 👋 👋 I’ve got two questions for you!”)

Most Hallmark emails go out as soon as a reader subscribes. With the Not a Newsletter welcome email, my goal is to do two things: Confirm your subscription, and ask two questions to learn more about you.

This email doesn’t seem all that complicated, but it works incredibly well. 76% of readers open it, and 1 in 5 reply to the email. That means that from Day 1, Gmail and the other inboxes are seeing readers open and engage with my emails, and it sends the message that any future emails from me should be treated as highly important. (Over the past 12 months, Not a Newsletter monthly email alerts have a 51% average unique open rate, and that’s because these onboarding emails set the table for future engagement.)

The other great thing about this email: It gives me the chance to start a conversation with you, my readers, right away, and learn more about what you need from me! That helps me decide what content to feature in Not a Newsletter and what products I should build to best serve you.

Email #2: The Talking Head email

The Talking Head is a letter from you to your readers. If you’re a newsroom, a non-profit, or a brand, the Talking Head probably comes from someone fairly senior on staff, usually 2-3 days after the Hallmark email.

The goal here is to make sure readers get to know you and learn why you do the work that you do. You might even be able to pair this with some sort of call to action (CTA) — clicking out to read more, a CTA to reply and start a conversation, etc.

For Not a Newsletter, I send an email three days later titled, “Three secrets I’ve learned about great newsletters.” In it, I tell the story of how I got started in email, and then share some of my core beliefs about email.

At the end of this one, I’ve got a CTA to click through to a worksheet that readers can work on. I share that because I want a new reader to get a lot of value as soon as possible from Not a Newsletter.

This email has a 67% open rate — which, again, pays dividends down the road for my inbox placement.

I also want to note: There’s no reason why you can’t send multiple Talking Head emails in an onboarding series! I work with teams that send up to 10 of these in the first 90 days to make sure they introduce the key members of their team.

Email #3 and #4: The Evergreen emails

The Evergreen email is a great opportunity for you to share links that your audience might always need. For newsrooms, these often include links to the best-performing stories on your site. For non-profits, this might be a good opportunity to share guides or resources that your audience consistently asks for. For brands or creators, this could be the place to share tips or ideas to help someone get the most out of the relationship with you. These emails typically go out anywhere from Day 7 to Day 21 in the journey.

With Not a Newsletter, I send two Evergreen emails to make sure that new readers can “catch up” on the products, guides, and resources I’ve put together over the years. In the third email, I link to a variety of resources, from my ESP guide to email podcasts I like. In the fourth, I highlight tools that you can use to improve your email program. Email #3 opens at a 62% open rate, and email #4 opens at a 56% rate — even though they’re actually sent a few weeks after sign up!

Email #5: The Survey email

Lastly, I’d encourage everyone to send a Survey as part of their onboarding process. Most send these in the second month after someone subscribes, between days 30 and 60. It’s a good way to check in with your new subscribers to make sure you’re delivering what they need.

I send my survey a little later, on Day 60. (It still does well, though: a 54% open rate, with about one in five readers clicking through to take the survey.) I try to keep the ask short and personal, and really emphasize that I won’t take up too much of your time.

If you send a survey like this, make sure you check in on the data at least once a quarter. The survey data will be one of the first indicators that you’re doing something right with your newsletter, or it might be a signal that you need to make a change.

What’s next for my welcome series?

I’m happy with the engagement on this series, but I know there’s room for improvement. The biggest change that I plan on making: I want to ask readers additional questions at sign up, and then put them into a customized journey based on their needs. For instance: Creators might get a slide deck built around getting their first 1,000 subscribers, whereas newsrooms might get resources around building a proper email team. I might also add welcome emails tied to the page on which a subscriber signed up. A reader who came via an article about launching a new newsletter might get additional links to read about how to grow their newsletter. And if I do launch any paid courses, workshops, or products, I’d want to add a CTA tied to those.

The welcome series is so crucial to the success of Inbox Collective, which is why I intend to keep investing in making it as useful as possible for my readers.

Thanks to our sponsors
The stories you’re reading on inboxcollective.com are made possible thanks to the generous support of our summer sponsors: ∙ Selzy, an easy-to-use email marketing platform ∙ Who Sponsors Stuff, a tool to help you find relevant sponsors for your newsletter