Our founder and CEO Erica met her husband at a poker night hosted by mutual friends. She saw him across the table, through the haze of one or two (or more, let’s be honest) glasses of wine, and thought, “You are mine.” As she puts it: “I saw right through that p-p-p-poker face and knew that this dude with the stoic expressions and boisterous laugh was somebody I needed to get to know better.”
But here’s the thing. Just because it was basically love at first sight doesn’t mean Erica would have said yes if Mr. Whiskers had popped the question that very night. They dated for over two years before he finally proposed, with a black lab puppy and a ring that was slightly too small.
We love telling Erica’s love-at-first-sight story at any opportunity, but there’s a business point in here for you.
Most of your prospects are not going to fall in love with your winery at first sight. And the ones who do? You can still turn them off by coming on too strong in the early days.
So how do you get to the cute-puppy-happily-ever-after stage with your customers? You capitalize on the momentum from a terrific first impression, then nurture the relationship into something more meaningful.
A welcome series can help you do that
Some sexy stats on welcome campaigns:
- 74% of subscribers expect a welcome email immediately upon signup [1]
- More than 8 out of 10 people will open a welcome email [2]
- Welcome emails see 4x the open rate and 5x the click-through rate of other emails [3]
- Subscribers who receive one deliver 33% higher engagement over the life of the relationship [4]
Your welcome campaign is the first impression, the gaze across the poker table. If you want it to land, make sure it:
- Sends immediately upon signup
- Says thank you
- Sets expectations, and delivers on them
- Reinforces your brand position and value
- Gives the customer something to do next, or something to look forward to
Want the deeper version? We break the winning welcome email down in the 100-point welcome email scorecard, and there’s an episode if you’d rather watch than read. Come back here when you’re done.
Once you have a winning welcome campaign in place, you’re ahead of more than half the retailers out there. We are totally fine with you being fine with that. But if you want to go allllll next level (which we know you do), it’s time to bust out the strategy hat and add a welcome series.
If a welcome campaign is GOOD, a WELCOME SERIES is BETTER
Retailers who send a series of welcome emails see 13% more revenue than those who send just one. [5]
There’s another reason a series wins, and it’s less flattering: PEOPLE DON’T READ. Most people spend under a minute scanning an email. Break your welcome into a series where each message focuses on one thing, and your subscribers actually get all of it.
Best of all, a series lets you nurture before you ask. Send one welcome email and drop your new subscriber straight into regularly scheduled programming, and the next thing they get from you is probably an offer. That’s asking for their hand in marriage on the second date. Works for some people, but maybe pump your brakes a touch.
Curious how to convert your welcome email into a series? Start with the customer experience. What is the next step for your new subscriber in their relationship with your winery, and what’s a logical way to get them there? Your welcome series should help them take that step.
How to turn your welcome email into a series
Step one: create a journey map
Ask the invisible bridge question: what does my ideal customer need to know, believe, or do in order to take the next step with my winery?
Share helpful information, customer testimonials, statistics, beautiful images, but break it up. Keep each email to one topic where you can. With that list of connection points in hand, you’ll have a pretty good idea how many emails your series needs.
Next, decide how long the series should run. Ideally all the emails land within one to two weeks of the opt-in, or you lose the top-of-mind momentum you just earned.
Then think about triggers beyond time. You might build different paths based on engagement or click behavior.
Say your series has five emails and a subscriber skips email #3, the one with testimonials about your tasting room and your top scores. Instead of sending #4 on schedule, resend #3 with a different subject line: add personalization, ask a question, drop in an on-brand emoji.
You can also build tracks based on demographic data or anything else in your data dictionary.
Say the goal is turning visitors into repeat purchasers. If you capture zip code, send a shipping offer for your online store to anyone more than 50 miles out, and a percentage-off code for a future tasting room visit to the locals.
Hot tip: make that repeat-purchase code time-sensitive. Urgency lifts conversion and pulls the revenue forward.
Put all of that together and you can draw a welcome journey map: what content you need to produce, plus a genuinely useful visual of the experience you’re building. HOORAY.
You can use a whiteboard, like Erica sometimes does ‘cuz she’s old school.
or try programs like Google Draw which can be shared, revised as changes are made, and generally are better than whiteboards.
Or best of all, start with one of your Email Service Provider pre-built flows or customer journeys. Here’s the default Welcome Series that Klaviyo gives you as a starting point…
Next, write your content and gather your images
We always write the email copy before going into a client’s email platform to build anything. A working draft in Google Drive or a Word doc helps us catch spelling and grammar issues, and it’s a much cleaner way to gather client feedback than sending test emails back and forth and making edits inside a campaign draft.
Creative content production uses a different part of your brain than building a functional email. Give yourself time to curate the image assets that tell the story and play with headline copy outside the drag-and-drop environment.
Happy with your content? Build your emails, baby
The single biggest time-saver for us and our clients is a saved, on-brand email template. Decide in advance which fonts and colors you’re using, how headlines and buttons should look, standard elements like your logo and any decorative flourishes, even what kinds of images belong. That’s what makes your campaigns look “like you,” consistent with your website, your tasting room, and every other place a customer meets your brand.
With a template in place, building is a snap. Copy and paste your content, drag and drop your images, and voila. No agonizing over which font to use or whether the button should be red or blue.
Not sure where to start? We break down three winery email template structures that consistently convert.
Add the finished emails to your automation
The language changes depending on your email platform, but the functionality is pretty standard. If you built your map outside the platform (ahem, whiteboard or Google Draw), this is where you recreate that welcome journey inside your platform’s automation builder.
Test your emails and the workflow
At minimum, send yourself and one other person on your team a test of every email. Open them on both mobile and desktop. Click every link to make sure it works.
Activate the program
When you’re confident the emails are 10/10 and the workflow is configured correctly, turn the series on.
One word to the wise: if you’re converting a previously live welcome email into a series, remove any contacts who already got a welcome campaign days, weeks, or months ago, at least if the new content would confuse them or feel out of date. If it makes sense for them to get the later emails on more of a delay, proceed merrily.
Add it to your automation program tracker
Update the tracker so your welcome campaign is now logged as a series, and update your data dictionary and anything else tied to the information you’re using to populate or trigger the program.
Documentation might not be the sexiest thing on your to-do list, but we pinkie-promise that crossing your t’s and dotting your, ahem, lowercase j’s makes a world of difference to your automation program, and saves you from marketing automation gone wrong.
Summin’ it up
A welcome campaign is essential to your winery’s email marketing program. If you want to woo your customers further, build a series that nurtures and engages new subscribers into a deeper relationship with your brand.
Set a goal for the series. Map the important steps on your customer’s journey to that destination. Use your platform’s automation builder to configure the messages based on triggers like time, email behavior, and demographic information. Run a quality check. Activate when you feel confident.
You’ll benefit from better customer connections, and the increase in customer value that follows, because you bent email marketing technology to your will.
FAQs about winery welcome series
How many emails should a winery welcome series have?
Three to five is the sweet spot for most wineries. Enough room to orient, connect, and guide without exhausting someone who just signed up. Your list of customer connection points should decide the exact number.
How long should a welcome series run?
Send everything within one to two weeks of the opt-in. Beyond that, you lose the momentum and top-of-mind awareness you just earned.
What should go in each email?
One topic each. Email one welcomes and sets expectations, email two builds connection and trust, email three offers a clear next step. Anything beyond that should add depth, not filler.
What if someone already got my old welcome email?
Exclude them when you launch the series, or start them partway in. Getting a “welcome to the winery” email six months after they joined is a bad look.
When is a single welcome email better than a series?
When you don’t have enough to say to fill three emails, or when your signup promise is transactional enough that one send delivers it completely. A discount code with nothing else behind it doesn’t need a sequence. Start with one email that does its job, then expand when the story gets bigger.
Want help building it?
Bring your welcome series, your automations, and your “can someone look at this before I press send?” questions to us inside Mavens On Demand. Or if you’d rather we just build the thing, that’s Email Essentials.
Until next time, keep pressing send on your next best email.
Sources: [1] Blue Hornet, [2] and [3] GetResponse, [4] Chief Marketer, [5] Internet Retailer 500
