20

Send a Welcome Email

Introduction

The way you make customers feel in the first few days after they’ve signed up for your site or service can influence their level of engagement with your company long-term. This moment of first impression is a crucial moment.

In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through creating your welcome email in Customer.io (and also assumes that you’ve completed your integration).

Ingredients

• Every customer in your Customer.io account has a created_at attribute that is a timestamp

Method

Most of the time, you’ll want to send your welcome series to all new users who sign up for your product or service. In Customer.io, this takes a few simple steps.

Create your segment for new signups

By default, you’ll have a segment in your account called “Signed Up”, which includes all users with a created_at timestamp attribute. Check out this segment by heading to Segments in the navigation.

If you’ve deleted this segment, don’t worry-it’s easy to recreate. In the Segments section of the app, click on Create Segments, and enter your segment name. Now, the segment builder will probably have this default rule set up already:

Make sure the rule is looking for the attribute created_at is a timestamp and then hit Save Changes.

This is what your Signed Up segment should look like after saving:

Set up your campaign trigger

Now for the campaign! In the navigation, head to Campaigns, then click Create Campaign. After naming and describing your welcome campaign, choose the condition triggered option.

Click Add segment condition and find the Signed Up segment to add to your Trigger:

Set up your welcome email

Add your email

Then, once you’re in the workflow tab, you can drag and drop an email from the left sidebar into your workflow.

When you click to edit the email, you can do many things:

Give that email a name that makes its welcoming purpose clear. (This doesn’t have to be your email’s subject line.) Then click Add Content to start writing your email.

Write your welcoming message

In our composer, you can fill in your message content, choose your email layout, and other details like sending address.

Our composer also has powerful tools you can use to personalize each email. You can use Liquid tags to add a customer’s name and otherwise tailor the content. In our example, we added our customer’s first name and plan details.

Edit your email’s behavior

When you return to the workflow and open the side panel, you can set this email to Queue Draft so that we can double-check if the campaign is set up correctly. That means, once the campaign starts, the welcome emails will be generated in real time but not send until you approve them. Otherwise, if you want the email to send right away, select Send Automatically.

Add your delay

Depending on your vision for your new customer experience, you may want to send your first welcome email right away, or give people some time to explore your product before you send your first message.

Let’s add a short delay before we send our welcome. In the workflow, click and drag a Time Delay just before the email:

For our example, we’ll set just a 10 minute delay before sending the welcome email. Click to edit the worfklow item, change the delay time, then save:

If you don’t want to add a delay, that’s it! Move onto the next step.

Optional: add a conversion goal

Next, you can set a conversion goal. This provides a way to track an action that you hope the new user will take after reading your message.

Conversion goals mark messagesThe instance of a message sent to a person. When you set up a message, you determine an audience for your message. Each individual “send”—the version of a message sent to a single member of your audience—is a delivery. and journeysA person or data object’s path through your campaign. as converted when a person performs an event, joins a segment, or leaves a segment. Track conversions to see how many of your messages and journeys have the desired effect with your audience. You can learn more about conversion-tracking here.

If you don’t want to set a conversion goal, click Skip goal.

Optional: change your exit conditions

In the case of this example, you can leave the Exit settings as they are by default. That is, a person will exit the campaign if it’s time to send them a message and they don’t match your triggers and filters. If you’d like more information on Exit Conditions, you can find it here.

Review and Start Campaign!

Almost there! Review your welcome campaign and check to see if there are any errors or anything missing.

Before you start your campaign, you can choose to either send your campaign to all people who ever signed up, or just new users who are signing up after the welcome campaign starts.

For welcome messages, you probably want to choose to send to Future matches only. Otherwise people who already exist in your system and signed up in the past will suddently get a random welcome email once you set your campaign live.

Finally, click Start Campaign, and that’s it! If you’ve set your email’s sending behavior to draft to check how your campaign will run, remember you’ll have to set to “Send Automatically” to reach your customers. Once emails start sending, you can head to the campaign’s overview page to see how the campaign is performing.

Other considerations

We’ve covered a welcome campaign that is email-based, but there are many more ways that you can reach out to customers in their first few days after signing up. You may want to include a combination of emails, SMS, Slack notifications, or all of the above in your series.

Here’s a quick example of a multi-step welcome workflow, once a user signs up and enters the campaign:

1. Wait 2 hrs
2. Send first email
3. When the user has opened that first email, send the next one using Action Conditions
4. Depending on an action they take in the second email, send them an SMS with a Twilio Action]
5. When the user receives the SMS, notify your sales team that they’ve reached this point in the funnel and need personal outreach Slack Action or Webhook Action to Salesforce{: target=’_blank’} and/or another app]
6. After the sales team has been notified, update an attribute on the customer to indicate that they have been contacted by the sales team. Create or update person action

The possibilities are endless with the combination of tools at your fingertips in Customer.io. For more great examples of welcome email series and what you can create, check out these articles:

• How Clearbit Conquered the Welcome Email
• 5 Keys to Welcome Emails that Make Rewarding First Impressions

Wrap Up

Welcome emails are a win-win for both your company and your customers. If you have any questions about how to set up a welcome email series, please get in touch!