Subscribers signed up for your newsletter because they liked what they saw, and now it's your turn to surprise them with more than they expected. Or, your customers bought a product or service that interested them, and it's time to introduce them to your company and establish a lasting relationship with them.

Why is it important to send welcome messages?

Beyond a welcome message being a polite and courteous way to say hello, there are also statistics that show just how powerful they can be. Welcome messages have an unusually high open rate compared to other email marketing messages and are 86% more effective than the average newsletter.

And, saving the best for last, subscribers who receive a welcome message show 33% more engagement with the brand.

By working with welcome messages, you can take advantage of the following benefits:

1. Provide information that, in the long term, will give a boost to your email campaigns and contribute to your marketing success.
2. Familiarize subscribers with your brand, so that they are more willing to receive and open new messages.
3. Stimulate immediate response through appropriate links and calls to action.

What makes your greeting a good welcome message?

Immediate

Don't waste time. As soon as someone subscribes to your communications, send them that welcome message. If they just signed up, it means they are still online and viewing your brand.

Fortunately, they are curious enough and your message might stimulate them to want to know even more.
Automating the sending of messages will help you achieve just that, since you will be able to schedule, with very little effort, your welcome message to be sent as soon as you get a new subscriber or customer.

Keep it short, but deliver on your promises.

You'll want to engage your audience as quickly as possible, but make sure you don't bore them. The content of the welcome message should be relevant, succinct and provide some kind of value. A welcome message should set your subscribers' expectations for the future. It's the first message they'll receive from your company, so give them an idea of what's to come and try to deliver on that in other messages you'll send.

Also, if you promised something in exchange for the subscription, perhaps a discount code or access to exclusive content, now is the time to deliver it. Offering incentives keeps customers engaged with your brand.

Your content must be personalized.

You're going a long way! Make use of any type of information about your new subscriber that will help make that welcome message more relatable and welcoming. If you have their name, use it in the subject line, the body of the message, or both.

Simply including the recipient's name in the subject line can increase the open rate by 20%.

Personalization of welcome messages keeps correspondence on a human scale. In MasterBase®, it's easy to add personalization to your email marketing and transactional messages.

Include enticing calls to action (CTA).

The main reason behind marketing messages is to convert subscribers into customers, and calls to action will do that for you. Always keep this in mind. Make your messages easy to find and attractive enough to get the recipient to click on them. This could be achieved with colorful, or perhaps a cool and provocative GIF.

That it has an appropriate color scheme

Color is a good way to attract attention and keep it. So much so that if the color scheme is off, subscribers may well lose interest.

Since the colors you choose are the first thing your customer will see when they open your message, you will want to make sure they represent your brand. It may seem simple and even obvious, but there are several details you should take into account so that your brand identity looks impeccable.

A welcome message or a whole series of messages?

The more content you need to include, the more it makes sense to split the welcome message into several serialized mailings.

The decision on the number of messages and frequency of sending depends on several factors. For example, the capacity of your email delivery system, the potential value you assign to each element contained in supporting your goals, a broader business model, among other reasons.

In order not to overwhelm your new subscriber with tons of information in your welcome messages, with lengthy and distracting texts, it is advisable to arrange them in an escalating series of information delivery, so that they are more likely to interact with it.

A simple example of a series of 3 messages:

A first message to be sent as soon as they register. It should contain easy and only preliminary information to fasten the onboarding process: a thank you for registering and a subscription confirmation.

The next day, a second message with a couple more steps, such as offering to set your messaging preferences and adjust your profile, and giving you links to social networks.

On the third day, a message showing them the most popular products, a demo or something they can try, so that they become familiar with your brand and services.

How to program this series of shipments with MasterBase®?

As part of our automation services, MasterBase® helps you schedule a series of welcome messages, through one-to-one, behavior-based mailings.

To start sending to contacts who have subscribed to your email communications you should consider the following steps:

1. 1. 1. Creation and enabling in your account of a rule that will allow the dispatching of your messages one by one and their subsequent follow-up.
      2. Define the channel through which prospects will agree to submit their data for subscription to your mailings, for example, a form on your website or social networks, and the internal use system - they are not necessarily the same - that will provide this information to MasterBase®, for example, an ERP or CRM.
      3. Then you must choose the most appropriate tool to automate the transfer of new subscriber data to your MasterBase® account. For a website, it is recommended to do it through the WebBehavior script and for an internal use system, such as ERP or CRM, through the APIs available in MasterBase® that allow automating this task.
      4. Once your account is configured to interpret the information provided by your new subscribers, through a virtual automaton, it is necessary to define a contact label for each programmed shipment, which will make it possible to assign conditions, for this example, the new subscriber condition, and associate them to the contacts through their e-mail address.
         Keep in mind that the validity of each of the labels will determine the date and time of the sending of each message.

1. 1. 5. Then you will need to create a search tag for each of the shipments, with the exclusion condition for each of the contact tags created in the previous step.
         This will trigger a one-time mailing for each subscriber each time a contact tag expires.
      6. Next, you must upload in your MasterBase® account the contents to be communicated in each mailing. In addition, you must upload, test and enable the layout that gives structure to the body of the message for each content format to be included in each mailing.
      7. The series of scheduled messages will start to be sent once the initial defined behavior is detected - for the case: a new subscriber - and will continue until the respective contact tags expire.