ZTG006 — Increase engagement from a welcome email
The very first email you send to a new email subscriber is prime real-estate.
At this very moment, your subscriber is at their most engaged in your content. They know exactly who you are, what you provide, and why they’ve just given you their details.
It’s an opportunity you cannot miss. It’s also a great opportunity for some testing and tweaking.
Below is an extremely simple experiment you can run. I hope it inspires you!
Experiment name
ZTG006 — Activation — Email — Increase engagement from a welcome email
Objective
To increase engagement of my ‘welcome to my newsletter’ email. Current statistics show about 50% of my subscribers open this email, which is most likely the highest open rate I’ll ever have. This is a great opportunity to encourage my subscribers to performing some tasks I would like them to perform.
Hypothesis
I predict the click-through rate on my welcome email will grow to 15%, a 275% improvement that will bring 21 more visitors to my website over the next 200 new subscribers.
Experiment Design
- Write a new welcome email.
- Find the top five articles on my blog and include them in the email as ‘must-reads’.
- Switch the current email with the new one.
Resource Estimation and Probability
Results
The new variation will engage 8 new visits per 100 new subscribers which is 200% more than the basic version of the welcoming email we had before.
Learnings
- Subscribers are interested in learning more
My ultimate goal for this experiment was to increase engagement from the first email I send out to new subscribers.
Engagement, of course, can be many things. It all depends on what you want your subscribers to do. My aim was to get users to click links and read more content from my website. I basically wanted to 1) keep them engaged and 2) learn more about what I do.
My suspicions were correct: subscribers are interested in learning more. I did wonder if it would feel too pushy to instantly want them to go back to my site, but it doesn’t seem like it is.
- Links to noob-friendly content works best
Out of the five links I presented in my email, one got most of the clicks; 32.9% (26 out of 79).
This was a particularly ‘noob-friendly’ article. It reinforces the fact that subscribers actually welcome this email. It’s also a good reminder that someone subscribing to your newsletter may come from very various places on your website/blog.
The welcome email is a great place to make sure everyone is up to speed on the basics of what you provide and the knowledge you aim to share.
- Low response rate
I have a habit of always adding questions at the end of my marketing emails. When a question resonates with a subscriber and they take the time to answer, great conversations sometimes ensues.
For the purpose of this test, I should have removed my question at the bottom of this email. It’s a conflicting CTA which may have muddied the results.
Turns out, only two people replied to my question (1.4%).
Action Items
- Split the test for good measure: run the same experiment but without the question. Are we getting more clicks?
I hope you found this experiment valuable. If you are growing an email list, chances are you have a welcome email. Have you ran any tests on it? Share your thoughts below!
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