We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again:
Welcome emails are VITAL for your eCommerce email marketing.
They’re great for…
- Setting the tone in your new subscriber-to-brand relationship
- Getting opened and read
- Improving your email sender score
- Snagging sales early on
Welcome emails can help you do all of that, and more so they’re pretty handy in more ways than one.
There are a lot of eCommerce brands out there rocking their welcome emails. And what’s great about looking at their efforts is that you can learn a lot from what they’re doing and apply it to your own eCommerce store.
We’ve collected a few eCommerce welcome email examples and we’ll cover what makes them great to give you ideas for what you could do with your own emails.
Alcohol Delivery brand, Saucey, has a bold and fun brand that extends into their welcome emails.
Their initial email after signup is the one you’ll find here.
They keep things simple and timeless with a “Welcome to Saucy” subject line. But the boldness of their brand comes shining through.
From the black and white photo of the guy who looks like he’s from an episode of Peaky Blinders to the slightly colorful language used in the copy, Saucey’s welcome email shows their unique bravado you’d hope for in a brand that delivers whiskey — among other things.
Another key factor to making this a great welcome email is their CTA.
First off, they have one in this first email that goes out. And secondly, the call to action directly implies purchasing something.
Another bold move that supports their branding.
Takeaways
- Be True To You. Saucey pulls no punches or acts like something they’re not. This type of authenticity adds to the trustworthiness that brand also no doubt wants to instill in the minds and hearts of new customers.
- Don’t Be Afraid To Sell. Yes, the email is saying “Oh hi, welcome to Saucey,” but it’s also inviting the new subscribers to start ordering. The CTA is a friendly invite to start shopping.
- Tell What Makes You Unique. Saucey will deliver your beer, wine or liquor to you within 30 minutes of ordering. That’s a nice hook, and it’s rather unique since many brands push that out to an hour if not days. This makes it easier for the welcome email to sell to someone who needs some adult friendly beverages in a short amount of time.
Burrow is a ship-to-your-door furniture store. And no, I didn’t mean for that to rhyme. That’s really what they are.
They have unique furniture that can be assembled without any tools and with stain-resistant fabric. This particular email in their welcome series is designed to educate — to build on the information you’d find on their website and in their marketing materials.
The entire email contains 5 FAQs with a lot of imagery and CTA links throughout the email. Another great thing about this email is that the product is on full display. Every image shows a piece of furniture which does great for branding.
It’s quite a long email, visually, but it does what it needs to help educate a potential customer.
Takeaways
- Try Including FAQs In An Email For Your Welcome Series. In an ever growing and competitive market, educating new subscribers and putting answers to questions they’re most likely to ask is a great way Burrow stepped up their game. In doing so, they’ve eliminated common areas of doubt or resistance to keep people from purchasing. This email reduces that friction while adding CTAs that increase the chance for a sale.
- Aim To Educate. This ties into the point above and Burrow does it well with using FAQs to educating subscribers. But there are other ways you could go about doing this. Videos or instructions with graphics can go a long way in helping close the gap from subscriber to customer. Look at your products and see where you might be able to help things along by providing value through education.
- Use Contrasting Colors To Draw Attention To Important Things In Your Email. Burrow uses yellow to stand out. You can use something else, but the nice thing about this is that it pulls the eye to areas that should be read. Don’t use too many colors since that defeats the purpose.
Okay, chances are you’re not in the bookselling business. But Barnes and Nobles welcome email teaches an important lesson:
Recommend Products To Your Subscribers.
You’ve probably heard this common saying. “People don’t usually know what they want until you show it to them”… or something to that effect.
The point being that people don’t always know what product they want from you, especially if you offer a lot of different products like Barnes and Nobles does. By recommending top selling books based on genre, they’re able to show a new subscriber at least one thing that’s going to catch their eye.
And at the very least, it shows they’re being helpful with also goes a long way in gaining trust to convert subscribers into customers.
Takeaways
- Product Recommendations For The Win. Your email marketing too should make it easy to build an email that allows you to recommend products to your subscribers. (If it doesn’t may we suggest a switch?)Use
- High-Quality Images That Help Sell Products. You’ve likely noticed that all the emails in the blog — Barnes and Nobles included — use really great, non-grainy photos. Blurry, grainy images put a bad taste in people’s mouth and that’s never good for your brand. But you shouldn’t stay away from images. They’re an important part of eCommerce emails. Just make sure that your emails look great and resize to still be sharp on mobile.
- Think Mobile-Friendly. Tying into the point above, mobile-friendly email design is important. Most emails get opened on a mobile device so if you’re email hasn’t been to look nice and pretty on a smaller screen it is going to frustrate your subscribers. Barnes and Nobles does a great job of making all emails look good on mobile and desktop. Most email marketing tools can make email look good on mobile, but when you’re dealing with something heavy on imagery and design, it’s easy for things to get muddled if you’re not testing things properly. Test your emails before you send them out to the world and try to test across as many email clients on mobile devices as you have access to.
There’s a lot to glean from these eCommerce Welcome Email examples. And hopefully, they’ve given you a few ideas for what you can do for your own welcome series.
But we want to stress another important point.
It can be easy to hold off on getting your welcome emails out into the world if you’re worried they’re covering all your bases.
But done is better than perfect.
Even if your emails are quite where you want them to be, you should still get them into the world to help improving your email sender score and deliverability. You can always circle back and change them up later.
But having something is better than nothing. And if you’re still looking for an email marketing tool for your eCommerce store, be sure to sign up for a free trial of Sendlane.