Welcome emails enjoy open rates of 60% or more; for most marketers, this will be your best-performing email ‘campaign’
Anyone who follows me knows I harp on businesses to build their own list of subscribers. From where I sit, if you aren’t building subscribers, you aren’t really doing “content marketing.” More importantly, absent subscribers, you are missing the benefits of producing all that content.
The other day I logged into my email marketing tool to check on the performance of my last newsletter – 35% open rate and about 4% click-through rate (CTR). That’s better than the industry averages – ~20% open rate and ~2% CTR – but then I noticed the numbers on the previous send – and it has a 64% open rate and 20% CTR.
In other words, that message had an open rate that was 2x and CTR that was 5x. Why are the metrics so high? That’s my welcome message. Any time someone subscribes to my weekly blog or the monthly newsletter – they get an automatic welcome email.
In that message, I thank people for subscribing, outline what to expect and list a few of my best-performing pieces. The campaign has been running since April 2020.
This isn’t an accident. Market research shows that ‘welcome emails’ typically have the highest open rate.
Consider the following statistics:
- Welcome emails have an open rate of 63.91% and a CTR of 14.34% according to GetResponse, an email marketing platform;
- Welcome emails have an open rate of 50% which is 86% higher than newsletters according to Emma, another email marketing platform; and
- 79% of marketers send ‘welcome emails’ which trails only newsletters at 81% according to Constant Contact, which also provides email marketing solutions. It also says subscribers who do receive a welcome note are prone to be more engaged over time.
So, the chances are your ‘welcome email’ will be your most-opened message as well. Choose your content carefully and be sure to keep it updated.
If you’d like to see examples that I use – try subscribing to my weekly blog or the monthly newsletter – and see the response. Let me know what you’d like to see differently.
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Image credit: DALL-E
