For today’s episode, I want to start by asking you to imagine that you’ve been invited to this spectacular event at someone’s house. When you arrive at their house, the front door is open. You wander in, keep calling out to see if anyone is around, and no one answers. No one comes to greet you at the door and you’re unsure if you’re even at the right place.
That’s exactly what happens when someone joins your mailing list and you don’t welcome them to it.
When someone joins your mailing list, it’s usually because they want to come to a webinar of yours, or you’ve invited them to receive your newsletters. A welcome email or a welcome email sequence is the equivalent of meeting someone at the front door, making sure they’re in the right place, and giving them the lay of the land.
In today’s episode, I’m going to walk you through how to welcome people to your mailing list in a way that’s effective and does a great job for your business.
Let’s dive in…
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Grab my free Core Messaging Template: tashcorbin.com/coremessage
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The first thing we need to consider is how people are joining your mailing list.
If most people jump onto your mailing list because they’re signing up for a free resource or a webinar, in most cases (hopefully in all cases), each of those things that they register for is going to have its own emails that go with it.
Let’s say someone signs up to your mailing list to receive a free ebook that you’ve created. You don’t just send them an email with the ebook and then never say anything more about it.
I would hope that you would send them a series of emails related to that ebook. That’s generally best practice.
I like to send around four emails over the period of 10 to 14 days when someone first signs up for something.
If they’ve signed up to get that ebook, they might get:
- Immediately: an email containing the ebook
- 3 days after that: an email that asks if they’ve had a chance to check it out, and provides a few extra pieces of information for some extra depth
- 5 days after that: an email that asks them some questions/invites them to ask you questions
- 7 days after that: a final email as a quick reminder to check out the ebook if they haven’t done so already, why they should check it out, and information about working with you further/the next logical step from there.
In most cases, if people have joined your mailing list by signing up for a freebie, they’re going to already get a series of emails. Those emails more directly relate to the thing that they signed up for, which is best practice.
If someone signs up to my Core Messaging Template, which is my freebie around how to craft a core message that does a really good job, then that tells me that what they’re focused on right now is getting their core messaging sorted.
My follow-up emails to that freebie are going to be related to wanting to really nail your messaging in your business.
That just makes logical sense, and that would be best practice.
But how do I ensure that if it’s the first time someone has joined my mailing list, they are also welcomed and I provide them with a bit more understanding of what to expect from being on my mailing list?
It’s the equivalent of telling people where the bathrooms are, where they can get a drink, and what’s going on at the party when they arrive at your house.
This brings me to my *gasp* moment in this podcast… I don’t recommend you send a welcome sequence. The reason why is that people are already going to be receiving emails from you in most cases that are more relevant to what they’ve signed up for anyway, so we don’t want to bombard them with a bunch of other emails that are all about you.
If you went to a party where the host spent the first hour of the party exclusively talking about themself and telling you all these things about themself, and nothing was relevant to you, they weren’t even remotely interested in you, then you wouldn’t have a good time at that party.
People don’t go to parties just to hear the party host regale everyone with story after story after story.
That’s the same with people joining your mailing list.
They joined your mailing list because they thought it would be beneficial to them. They thought that there was some really good insight or a great resource that was going to help them with a particular problem they’re facing.
When it comes to welcoming people onto your mailing list, I actually don’t recommend adding a bunch of other emails that are talking about yourself. You’ve got an About Me page on your website (in most cases). If they’re really hungry to know about you, they can ask questions, and they can go and check out your website. They can go out and do some exploring.
Let people go and find the information that they want to find.
Instead what I recommend doing is just making sure that you are letting people understand that they’re in the right place. That’s most important.
I recommend one welcome email. That’s it. Not a sequence, not a bunch of introductory emails.
In the last six months, I’ve probably signed up to 30 people’s mailing lists. And 90% of the welcome sequences that I’ve been through, were all about the person who was sending the emails. They just started to sound really narcissistic. I was bored. I stopped opening their emails.
There were too many emails! I was getting emails about webinars, and I was getting emails about the thing that they were selling on the webinar, and I was getting emails that were telling me about them and their business and how many different podcasts they’d been on and how many thousands of people trusted them.
When you have someone come in for a job interview, they want you to hire them. That is effectively the position a business owner is in when I join their mailing list. They’re trying to convince me that I should hire them – I should pay them some money. If you had someone walk into a job interview and they non-stop talked at you about themself and didn’t even allow you to ask any questions, you wouldn’t hire the person.
That is how I feel reading through most people’s welcome sequences. There are just too many emails and they’re too self-centered.
It’s not particularly effective. It’s not particularly engaging.
What I would recommend that you do instead is just send one welcome email.
Make it a little bit about you. It’s lovely to get to know you a little bit and be a person. That’s totally fine. But it’s far more important to me, as a new subscriber to your mailing list, to know where I’m in the right place or not. What can I expect from you? Why was this a good decision for me to sign up for your mailing list?
You don’t tell me why it’s a good decision by telling me the reasons… you prove that it’s a good decision by making me feel like I’m in the right place. You prove that it’s a good decision by being helpful and cutting through all of that normal noisy stuff that I would normally have to wade through when I join someone’s mailing list.
That is the structure that I would recommend for that welcome email.
Whenever someone signs up for a resource, buys a product or joins my mailing list in any way, I have it set up in my system that if that email address has not been registered with my system before, they get my welcome email one hour later.
If someone’s already on my mailing list and they sign up for a webinar, they don’t get my welcome email. They only get the emails related to the webinar.
If someone joins my mailing list for the first time, they get an email from me an hour after they’ve joined that says, “According to my systems, this is your first time on my mailing list so I thought I’d reach out and send you this little welcome email.”
I’m letting them know from the outset that they’re getting this because I think it might be their first time on my mailing list. It’s really helpful to establish that the email is just a once-off because I want to ensure that I introduce myself and that they understand what to expect from here.
I recommend you do something like that.
Explain why they’re receiving the email and let them know what to expect from you from here.
You may want to mention that you send out a newsletter roughly every week, and in that newsletter, you share your latest feature piece of content, as well as some tips and ideas on how they can achieve the outcome you focus on in your core messaging.
You might even mention that you’ll let them know about events and extra opportunities for you to work together from time to time.
You’re keeping it nice and clear about what they can expect from you.
Something that I say in my welcome email is that I am a content-creating machine. I love creating content and helping people, and I have a thousand things that I want to say every minute. But by being on my mailing list, they’ll make sure that they never miss the important stuff.
I do Facebook Lives, I share content on social media, I have a podcast that I record every week, and will often come up with last-minute events and ideas. But by being on my mailing list, they’ll know and be able to trust that if they read my emails, they won’t have missed out on anything important.
That’s in essence telling people that they’re in the right place.
It also tells them that I’m not going to make them chase me around the internet in case they miss out on something. All the best stuff comes to people on my mailing list.
I haven’t used those words (because I think those words are a little bit overused). I just share that I can’t help myself – I go live on Facebook pretty much every week, and I understand that chasing me around the internet and trying to watch every little piece of video content that I create and listen to all my podcasts and catch everything that I share in all the different spaces can be really challenging.
If you read my email each week, that’s where you’re going to know that you get the very best of the information I’ve shared. If it’s particularly important or I think it’s going to be helpful, I always let my mailing list know about it.
That gives them information in my welcome email of what to expect.
I also recommend you include in that welcome email a little bit about why it’s a good decision to be on the mailing list, but through the lens of the core thing that you help people with.
That can be tricky for a lot of people, and I understand that not everyone has their core messaging nailed. That’s why I highly recommend you check out my free Core Messaging Template.
That helps you get clear on what exactly your core message is, and what you need to share. What is the core substantive piece of work that you do – the transformation that you facilitate – so that you can express and share that with your audience?
That’s a really important piece to put in your welcome email.
If you’re unsure how to express that, the Core Messaging free resource is a great place for you to go and get that sorted.
It helps you get really clear on:
- What is it that you help people to achieve?
- What are the main struggles that you help people to overcome?
- What’s the value proposition?
- What is the benefit of someone following you online and being in your orbit?
I also think it can be helpful to let people know how they can work with you, particularly in the early stages of your business.
If you’re focused on working with people one-on-one, then let people know that the main way someone works with you is through your VIP packages or one-on-one consultations. Mention that if that’s something they’re looking for help with, then they should reply and let you know.
You can actually generate some leads from that welcome email!
But I do want to say that for most of you, people are going to sign up for a specific freebie, and that freebie is going to have an upsell.
It can do that upselling job. It would be far more effective and far more important to the growth of your business to get people to reply to your welcome email and tell you a bit about themselves in the context of the work that you do.
Seeing as I work with people who have online businesses, or an idea for an online business, my welcome email literally says three times “I love hearing about everyone’s different businesses, so please reply and tell me about your business. What is it that you’re doing? Where are you stuck?”
I say it in different ways, but in that email, I have the same call to action three times.
That call to action is reply.
I tell people that I love getting replies. And I read their replies because a lot of people don’t like getting replies to their business emails, and I’m different in that way. That’s something that I make really clear.
In your welcome email, I would love for you to think about: What would be one of the most effective questions or pieces of information that you could ask your audience to give?
Let’s say you’re a parenting expert, and that’s something that you specifically help people with. Is it more helpful for someone to reply and tell you how many kids they’ve got? Or is it more helpful if you get them to reply with what their biggest challenge with parenting their child in the way that they really want to is, or who in their life most interferes with their parenting in the way that they want to, and how they interfere?
It’s starting a conversation.
That’s lead generation. That’s nurturing a one-to-one relationship with individuals who’ve signed up to your mailing list.
I have hundreds of people sign up to my mailing list each month, and I get 30-40 replies to my welcome email each month. I have the time to read everyone’s replies, and I love getting them and responding. That’s still a very good use of my time, even at this stage of my business and this size of business.
Often when people are thinking about email marketing and emailing their mailing list, they’re really hesitant to ask their mailing list questions or encourage their mailing list to reply to them, because they’re worried that they’ll get too many replies and they’ll get overwhelmed because they already have too many emails in their inbox.
But let’s say you’re getting 100 emails a day. I would guess that 90% of those emails are newsletters, spam or things that you’ve signed up for in the past, and you’re not actually working with the person. What if you unsubscribe from 50 of those newsletters and had five potential clients – five people who’ve joined your mailing list – each week replying to your emails and telling you something interesting and useful, and whether they’re a lead of yours or not.
I think people prioritise the wrong stuff in their business a lot of the time.
The more one-to-one conversations you can have with people within your niche who are potential clients and who are within your audience, the more insight you get as to what messaging and content is going to be the most effective. Therefore, the more leads you will generate in your business and the more sales you’ll have in your business.
The number of people you’re having one-on-one conversations with about your work is a direct correlation to the number of clients you’ll end up having.
There is a direct relationship between those two things.
Lead generation and clients are directly related in terms of numbers.
The number of people on your mailing list and the number of sales you make are not directly related.
I’m not making ten times the number of sales now with a list of over 10,000 people as I did when I had 1,000 people on my mailing list.
In fact, I would say that when I had 1,000 people on my mailing list, I made only 20-30% less in sales, in terms of number of clients, because the percentage of my mailing list who replied to my emails back then was a lot higher because I encouraged it so much. I generated a lot of leads out of a very small mailing list.
These days, my mailing list is still minuscule compared to most big businesses. But my conversion percentage and lead generation percentage is huge.
I think one of the core reasons why is because when people come to my party at my front door, I’m there, welcoming them in. Not only that, I’m telling them I want to have a conversation with them while they’re here at my party. I want to get to know them one-on-one as a human being. Not just because the more people that I know one-on-one as human beings, the more sales I make. But also because I genuinely want to know who’s signing up to my list, and I genuinely want to create connections and relationships with those people, because I’m genuinely interested in what people want, what they’re doing and what kinds of businesses they’re starting.
That is my hot take on how to welcome people onto your mailing list.
I don’t recommend a welcome sequence for the general people joining your mailing list. Just send one welcome email. But make it a really lovely one. Be mindful about how much time and attention span you will have from people to read that email, but give it a go and experiment. Potentially include a photo of yourself, include a little bit of info about who you are, but be really mindful of what is going to be useful, valuable and helpful to someone who has just come to your party (joined your mailing list). What are they most going to want to know?
The other thing to remember is that you’re going to have lots of opportunities to email them. You don’t have to jam everything into this one email.
Just give people a little bit of depth of understanding of what’s going on and what to expect, as well as the types of things you’re interested in learning about them.
Remember that you’ve got time to develop that relationship in your newsletters and in the emails that follow up from your freebies and opt-ins. You’ve got time to share all the information you want to share with them. Just focus on what’s going to be most helpful for them in this particular moment. What’s going to feel the most engaging for them?
Create that depth of connection and engagement with them in that way.
That’s it for this episode on how to welcome people to your mailing list.
Make sure you check out my Core Messaging Template so we can ensure you’ve got your messaging nailed: tashcorbin.com/coremessage
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
