If you have a signup feature on your WordPress website, your users will get an email relating to their login details, but that won’t be specific for your site/company; it’ll relate to the WordPress side of things.
It can be important, however, to welcome back to your website in a proper way. A welcome email can include essential information about your company, links to get started, contact information for when they need help, and things like that.
In this blog, we’re going to take a look at everything you need to know about WordPress welcome emails, including how you can set them up, best practices, and so on.
Before we get into how you can set up these welcome emails, let’s think about why you should. As we’ve already mentioned, WordPress will send an email to a new user when they sign up, but that’ll only contain information about their registration. There won’t be much useful information about your company if any at all.
Welcome emails can fulfill all kinds of roles for your company. Consider them as an “onboarding” tool that’ll educate them about what your company can do for them. Of course, what that is will depend on your specific type of company.
It’s a membership service; then, you can run through all the benefits of their membership. If you’re running an online store, then highlighting some of your most popular products would be a good idea (if you have data about your customer’s interests/other purchases, then this can be customized).
Ultimately, the benefits of a welcome email are varied and extensive. You can use them to highlight whatever you think needs to be highlighted to your customers about your business. They can also be used to get the relationship between you and your customer off on the right foot.
The interest that they’ll hold in your company will be particularly high at that point; there’s little surprise that welcome emails have some of the highest engagement levels of any corporate email marketing.
What Do You Want To Say?
Before you begin making all the effort involved in creating a WordPress welcome email, first, you’ll want to think about what you want to say. People get many emails from companies, and not all of them bring value to their lives. There’s no point in sending one because you think you should -- there should be a reason and motivation behind the welcome email.
Not that this reason has to be overly complicated. It’s fine to send an email that welcomes the person to your company and nothing more.
If you have a SaaS business, then a welcome email will likely have useful links informing the customer of the best tips for using your software.
Regardless of the email's content, the email should help to push your relationship with your customer forward in one way or another. In an age when competition for customers can be so fierce, you must be using every tool at your disposal -- and if you get your welcome email right, then it’ll prove to be an excellent tool indeed.
Customize WordPress Emails and Alerts – Better Notifications for WP
If you have simple needs for your welcome emails, then a plugin will likely do the job just fine. They’re not so useful if you want greater control over the email since they’re less flexible, but if you’re OK with that, then it’s a good way to go.
You can use several plugins to send a welcome email, but one of the most popular is Better Notifications For WP. You’ll find it on the WordPress plugins page.
Once you’ve got it installed, it’s a simple matter of navigating to Notifications>Add New. There’s a dropdown menu that includes ‘New User - Post-registration email’ that you should select. Below that, you’ll find the box where you can enter the text and images of the email you want to send.
There are many useful shortcodes in the plugin that’ll make things easier to manage, for instance, one that’ll automatically generate the name of the new subscriber.
Be sure to send yourself a test email before saving it to your site; this will give you a chance to see if any obvious errors need correcting.
WP Mail SMTP by WPForms – The Most Popular SMTP and Email Log Plugin
Of course, if you’re going to time thinking about, planning, and then composing a welcome email to your customers, then you’ll want to ensure that it ends up in their inbox. This will be an issue with WordPress itself, rather than with their spam filter (it should get through that without problems).
To do this, you’ll need to take a look at your WordPress hosting company. Many don’t provide the right setup for sending mail through WordPress, while some don’t have it activated at all.
And of course, if that aspect of WordPress is not set up correctly, then your users will not receive your emails. While you could go through talking with your WordPress hosting company, a simpler solution is to install a plugin like WP Mail SMTP.
If you don’t want to do things your own way, you can always use an email marketing service. This works better than most plugins because the email content is more customizable; you’ll be able to really represent your brand. The other advantage is that you can set up more than one automatic mail to new subscribers. For instance, if you want to follow up with your customers several days after they’ve signed up, then you can schedule another automatic email to be sent.
Now that you know how to set up a welcome email, let’s have a closer look at the types of emails you might send. There are plenty of different emails to send as your first message.
Hello
If you don’t have all that much to say in your first email yet still want to make your new customer feel welcome, then a simple hello message will suffice. In this type of message, you’ll have some simple text and photographs and present an opportunity for your customers to click back through to your website. You’ll usually follow this email up with something a bit more robust later on down the line, but if you want to start things off casually, then it’s a good option.
Thank You For Signing Up
It shouldn’t be forgotten that a person giving you their email should be considered something of a big deal in this day and age. After all, people typically have their inboxes filled with emails -- if they’re interested enough in your company to give you their email address, then it’s worthwhile showing some gratitude.
You don’t need to go overboard with this type of message. A couple of paragraphs is usually fine, along with a warm image (perhaps of the founder/team of employees). It’s good to relay some important information, including how often you’ll send them emails or how they can get any help they need.
Educating Your Customers
There may be a lot to learn about your company and the services that it provides. While you’ll have endeavored to make things as intuitive as possible, you should always factor in people with different skill levels.
In your welcome email, you can walk your customer through the process of getting started. This is an especially recommended email to send because if your services are complicated or require some effort on behalf of the user, this can be the push they need to dive in and get started.
What’s Good About Your Company
The person that signed up for your website might already know everything there is to know about your company. But you can assume that they don’t. Your welcome email is an opportunity to put your best foot forward.
And by that, we mean showing off all there is to love about your business. This should be fun, which means plenty of high-quality photographs, a strong tone, and not overly salesy (though feel free to include links to more sales pages).
Discounted Goods
If someone has signed up for your WordPress email, then you’ll know that they’re interested in your business. That means that they’ll be more likely to buy than a stranger. So why not look at giving them an extra incentive to make a purchase? An introductory offer of 20% off might be all they need to complete a purchase.
If you need help driving more business to your WordPress page, then be sure to get in touch with us here at Bright Vessel. We can provide a content marketing strategy that will have a positive impact on your bottom line.
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