Welcome Automation Series
A Welcome Automation series is both a better way to start a relationship with new subscribers, as well as an opportunity to increase the likelihood that these new subscribers will make a purchase. The highest open rates and engagement rates a brand will ever see are with Welcome emails that are sent immediately after someone signs up for your email list.
The purpose of Welcome Automations is to nurture new leads with a certain type of content/messaging.
Generally, a Welcome Email series should include between 2-5 emails that get sent to new subscribers before they get added to a marketing email list and/or start receiving regular campaigns. Most of my clients’ Welcome email series include three emails.
- The first email is usually a welcome to your list/business or thank you for signing up + a discount offer on 1st online purchase + a description of what they can expect from your business (i.e. frequency of communication, type of communication, etc.).
- The second email is usually a story about or background on your winery or business.
- The third email can be anything from a collection of your customer’s favorite recipes (on your website) or products or an email where you let these new subscribers know what annual events are most popular to a popular piece of content that is brand appropriate. Ex: for example, for my Sicilian wine club client, I set their 3rd Welcome email up to share a popular blog post about native Sicilian Wines and Grapes that I had previously published and turned into an email campaign/evergreen sales tool.
- A good way to optimize a Welcome series email for potential sales is to include a section underneath the main message and signature that displays ‘Our Customer’s Favorite Products’ or ‘Some of Our Most Popular Products’ with images of some of your best selling products.
Abandoned Cart Automation
Most businesses see a huge % of Abandoned Carts. Approximately 70%+ of online consumers abandon carts in the gourmet food/wine/DTC niche.
Abandoned Cart Automations normally get conversion rates of 10%-30%, meaning that they can recover between 10%-30% of those unfinished (and likely lost) sales, significantly boosting your business’s revenue.
If you do not have an Abandoned Cart automation set up, it’s time to get this set up!
If you do have an Abandoned Cart email setup but are not experiencing the above levels of recovered sales, take a look at your Abandoned Cart headline and content and see if it can be further personalized/customized. For example, try using ‘We saved your order for you [insert first name here]’ versus ‘you left items in your cart’. You could also include content below your email message such as ‘What Our Customers have to say about XYZ product’ (displaying positive customer reviews of the product).
**Also, take a look at your checkout process and make sure it’s smooth, intuitive/user-friendly, and that customers aren’t experiencing anything confusing, off-putting, or surprising. Poor customer or user experience during check-out contributes to a large % of Abandoned carts.
Other Automations You Can Set-Up:
‘Viewed Item’ Automations: These are automated email sequences triggered by a customer viewing a product more than x times. These can help nudge a customer who’s interested in a particular product or page (i.e. an event listing) to make a purchase.
Post-Purchase Customer Satisfaction Automation: These are emails brands can set up to send a certain # of days or weeks after a customer purchases a product, to ask the customer how they liked the product/how satisfied they were with their purchase. These can serve both as an important way to gauge which products customers like most and which may be falling flat as well as help your business acquire valuable customer testimonials/reviews.
Birthday Automations: Emails triggered by subscribers’ birth dates where you simply wish them a happy birthday or offer them a free gift.
Back in Stock Automations: This is an automation sent to customers who previously attempted to purchase an item but were unable to due to it being out of stock, letting them know the item is back in stock.