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How to Write the Perfect Welcome Email in Under One Minute

Your welcome email is the very first message you send to your subscribers — so it’s important to make a fantastic first impression. The reason: If you dazzle your readers with your welcome email, they’ll be more likely to open the next email you send. (Your welcome email is just one of the 7 messages successful entrepreneurs and businesses use in their marketing. Learn the 7-email formula — plus discover how to create your very own engaging, profitable automated email series with 24/7 Email Marketing Master Class. Hurry! Registration closes March 13th.) But that doesn’t mean you need to spend hours crafting the perfect welcome email. You can do it in less than a minute. Seriously. We timed it. You can use AWeber’s Email Libs tool. It comes with 50 templates, and all you need to do is fill in the blanks. Check out how easy it is to use below.

What to include in your welcome email

This welcome email template in Email Libs includes some key components every welcome email should have.

1. It welcomes your subscribers to your list.
2. It sets expectations (reveals the type of content your subscribers can expect from you, as well how often they will receive it).
3. It delivers your lead magnet a.k.a. your incentive (if you have one) for joining your list.
4. It includes your contact information.
5. It asks your subscribers to “whitelist” you so that your messages reach their inbox instead of their spam folders.

If you want to really knock your welcome email out of the park, though, we recommend using it as a starting place. 

Add your own twist

Once you fill in the blanks in the template, copy and paste the words into a Word doc or a Google doc. Then add your own “spice” to the text to personalize it. Here are some easy ways to do that. 1. Be human. Your welcome email is automated, but it shouldn't sound like it came from a robot. Your subscribers want to hear from you. Set the tone, and let your personality shine through. If you like using emojis, add one. 😎 If you have opinions, confidently express them. If you’re always an optimist, end with your favorite motivational quote. If you pride yourself on being irreverent, then tell it how it is! Heck, if you’re the king of “dad jokes,” include one. (How do you make a Kleenex dance? Put a little boogie in it!) Remember, this is your first impression. Make a splash right from the get-go. If you do this right, your readers will eventually be able to recognize your voice in every stage even if your logo and brand colors go missing from your emails. And they'll be even more excited to open your next email. 2. Avoid R.O.T. (redundant, outdated, and/or trivial information). Your content has to be valuable. A subscriber joined your list because they think you can help them solve their problem. Sure, you may have a free lead magnet to entice them, but that content still needs to be high-quality, fresh, creative, and useful. If it’s just something your subscribers can find on Google or your emails are full of content that your competitors also provide, they’ll bounce out of your list and never make it to the next email in your series. 3. Tell stories. Humans love stories. We communicate through them. We learn from them. Our personal stories and memories give our lives meaning and order.

Your welcome email can include your story. It’s your chance to tell your subscribers why you’re the best person to give them information.

But don’t write a novel. Try to keep your story to 10 sentences or less.

Here’s a great example of a super short, but compelling Story Email from Jill Angie of Not Your Average Runner. It’s her first email in her automated series for new subscribers, and it’s included as a section within her welcome note.

Jill’s story is 10 sentences. That’s it. But in her story she oozes likability and she hits her readers’ biggest pain point: weight loss. She knows that’s why her subscribers joined her mailing list, so she wastes no time addressing their challenge in her very first message. If you’re not a writer, no problem. Shoot a quick 30-second video of yourself and link out to it from your welcome email. Or include a photo of yourself. 

What comes after your welcome email?

Once you have your welcome email set, it's time to start thinking about the rest of your automated sequence. The best email marketers are not spinning their wheels every day trying to come up with email ideas. They're not trading time for money. They've automated their emails so their subscribers go through their entire marketing funnel. They turn their subscribers into buyers, and then buyers into brand advocates — without ever manually sending an email! It all runs on autopilot, bringing in new customers and driving profit day after day after day. In 24/7 Email Marketing Master Class, we reveal the perfect automated 7-email sequence that successful entrepreneurs and businesses are using right now. By the time you finish the class, you'll be able to build your very own automated series that gets results around the clock. Sign up now — registration closes March 13th!  

The post How to Write the Perfect Welcome Email in Under One Minute appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

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How We Increased Engagement for Our Online Course by 150% with Email Automation

Every subscriber on your email list is unique. One subscriber may prefer daily emails. Another may like weekly emails. How can you make everyone happy? Here at AWeber, we faced this question ourselves. Many subscribers who took our popular "What to Write in Your Emails" course said they didn't like the daily cadence of emails. But we had a dilemma: Some subscribers told us they'd prefer more frequent emails, while others requested less frequent emails. That’s why, when we revamped the course in 2017, we decided to let subscribers choose their own course email frequency — with email automation! Subscribers simply selected their preferred email frequency on the course sign up form. Then, automation delivered their course emails at their preferred time. This simple change skyrocketed engagement. Open rates increase by 47 percent and click-through rates increase by 150 percent! Want to see how we did it? Check out a step-by-step explanation below. And if you're interested in taking your email marketing to an all-new level, sign up for 24/7 Email Marketing Master Class. You'll discover how to build and launch your own automated email campaigns that turn subscribers into buyers, and generate results around the clock. (Hurry! Registration closes March 13th.)

The 3 frequency options

While we wanted to give our subscribers the power to choose their own email frequency, we didn't want to make this choice overwhelming. So we limited their options to three:

• one lesson a day
• two lessons a day
• one lesson every other day

These options allowed us to cater to those who wanted to consume lessons faster, and those who preferred a slower pace. To make this possible, we created three email series, each with different time delays between emails. The best part? We didn’t need to create all new content for the three different series. We wrote the six lesson emails, and then, for each series, made small tweaks to the copy at the end of the emails. Here’s a screenshot from the end of the welcome email in the one lesson every other day series: Here’s the same section of that email from the one email per day series: And here’s the same section of the email in the two emails per day series: See how similar these three email sections are? We only needed to change a few words to make them relevant for subscribers. Once our automated series were ready, we launched them and collected the results.

Here’s what happened

There was quite a spread. Our subscribers had very different preferences:

• 46% chose daily emails
• 31% selected emails every other day
• 23% chose two emails per day

However, this small change — allowing subscribers to choose their own email frequency — had a huge impact. As I mentioned earlier, engagement skyrocketed. Open rates increase by 47% and click-through rates increase by 150%! And giving our users the ability to choose when we messaged them improved our qualitative data, too. Here are just a few of the reactions we got after we implemented the change: One respondent said: “I really liked that I could choose how many emails I received a day. I chose two to get finished a little faster!” While another mentioned, “I really liked the choices for scheduling the classes. Was helpful and I did most of them near delivery date.” And one person even said, “The email series was phenomenal.” Would you like to see results like these? Enroll in our online course 24/7 Email Marketing Master Class. During the course, you'll learn how to set up automation like this and put your marketing efforts on autopilot with email automation.

Step-by-step instructions for doing this yourself in AWeber

How we collected our subscribers’ preferences

First, you need to collect the frequency preferences of individual subscribers. You can begin doing this by adding a frequency question to your email sign up form. Here’s the question we added to our “What to Write in Your Emails” landing page sign up form: “How often would you like to receive lesson emails?” When a subscriber chose their ideal frequency on the form, AWeber automatically applied a tag to the subscriber which matched their frequency choice. (You can launch automated series based off a tag, so we used these tags to segment our subscribers into our three different automated series. I'll explain this in more detail shortly.) If you use AWeber sign up forms, you would set this up by:

• Creating a new field on your form
• Choosing “Radio” as your input type
• Entering your question, your subscribers answer options, and the appropriate tags.

For our “What to Write in Your Emails” example, here’s what our form settings look like in AWeber: We named our tags “wtw-every-other-day,” “wtw-one-per-day,” and “wtw-two-per-day.”  (WTW is our abbreviation for What to Write.) Setting up the form was that simple! With this added question, our subscribers could choose their favorite frequency option on the form, and AWeber automatically tagged them. Now, let’s talk about the automated series. Pro tip: You can name your tags whatever makes sense to you! But keep in mind, you may want to use tags to segment your audience in the future. That's why tags should be descriptive enough that you understand what they mean.

How we set up the automated series in AWeber

We created three automated series in AWeber's automation platform Campaigns – one for each frequency choice. We set up the three automated series to trigger off the tags we used in our sign up form. If a subscriber had the “wtw-one-per-day” tag, AWeber automatically added them to the automated campaign which delivered one email each day. To ensure subscribers only received emails on the days they selected, we added time delays between each email. These time delays were different for each automated series. For instance, in the one email per day campaign, we added one-day delays between each email. Here’s how the finished one email per day campaign looks inside Campaigns: Pretty cool, right? These three series are examples of action-based automation (when a subscriber automatically receives emails based off the choices they make). With action-based automation, you can increase your email engagement by sending the right content to the right person at the right time.

Want to master action-based automation?

Save your spot in 24/7 Email Marketing Master Class, the most complete course for creating a powerful, profitable email automation campaign that gets results around-the-clock. Hurry! Enrollment closes on March 13. During the course, you'll:

• Pinpoint your business’s USP (unique selling proposition) to set yourself apart from the masses
• Map out your own powerful marketing funnel that seamlessly moves your subscriber through his or her purchasing journey
• Obtain little-known writing tips and email marketing strategies to help you convert subscribers into “buying” mode
• Learn the SEVEN battle-tested email strategies that the most successful brands and entrepreneurs are using right now.
• Get an all-access look at extremely profitable email series and the techniques they use to turn subscribers into advocates
• Learn about the best integrations to make your email marketing efforts run smoothly and effectively
• Grasp the ins-and-outs of how to set up a single-flow automated email series or a more advanced action-based automation email series
• Build your own effective and profitable automated email campaign to skyrocket your business

Want to know more? Learn more about the course here.

The post How We Increased Engagement for Our Online Course by 150% with Email Automation appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

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#SproutChat Calendar: Upcoming Topics for March

Spring is finally upon us and what better way to celebrate the season change than brushing up on our professional skills and connecting with new folks? As social media adapts to the ever changing trends, it’s smart to stay up to date by learning from others in the industry.

This March, we’ll be covering a number of topics ranging from chatbots to customer service to storytelling. Anyone who works in social is able to benefit from the bevy of topics that we’ll be discussing this month.

Wednesday, March 7: Chatbots & Customer Service

As chatbots evolve to better support business’ needs, how can they integrate well into your social strategy? Sprout All Star Elite, Jeff Higgins, joins the chat to talk through the advantages of a thoughtful chatbot strategy. Participants can expect to also walk through how chatbots can elevate a brand’s customer service approach.

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Wednesday, March 14: Data-Driven Storytelling

What role does data play in your social media strategy? Can it go beyond monthly wrap-up reports and help your social strategy? The ability to uncover insights and tell a cohesive story can be a compelling tool in your content development. Michael Brito will join #SproutChat to talk about the importance of data in your social storytelling efforts.

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Wednesday, March 21: Social Media for Diverse Audiences

Marketers are keenly aware that audience is key in developing their social strategies. But what if your social channels communicate to a multitude of audiences? How does this impact your strategy? Sprout All Star Elite, Tim Cigelske, will share how he does just this and highlights how higher education institutions can communicate to various audiences on social media.

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Wednesday, March 28: Creating & Maintaining a Social CRM

For businesses big and small, a CRM is an essential tool for a sales team to keep track of the conversations they’re having with prospective and current customers. Social media isn’t any different. This week at #SproutChat we’ll chat about how social media managers can keep track of customers across social channels.

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This post #SproutChat Calendar: Upcoming Topics for March originally appeared on Sprout Social.

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