‘Welcome’ Emails aren’t Welcome Here

photo by alborzshawn

Marketers encourage you to use welcome emails as an opportunity to market. Those same marketers are the ones writing all the articles about how integrity and relationship-building are so important to your content strategy.

If you've succeeded in getting someone to sign up for your newsletter, don’t muck it up! I’m pretty sure they didn't sign up for a welcome email.

Several times now I have signed up for a newsletter and then immediately unsubscribed when I received a welcome email that:
  • had no value whatsoever for me
  • contained (a lot of!) advertising
  • was long, boring and ugly
  • made me think, “If this is an indication of what is to come...?” and then hunt for the unsubscribe link
There is another, much better, way to communicate to your new subscriber – use a landing page, also called a redirect page, in your sign up process. I can think of some situations where a welcome email might be desirable but, in most cases, a landing page can accomplish the same thing - just better.


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