Timing your email types in a new customer welcome campaign

When creating a new customer welcome campaign you have to strike a balance between educational and pitching.

If you go pure education, you run the risk of only the most motivated customers buying.

If you go pure pitching, you run the risk of pissing off new customers and never seeing them again.

A balance between the two is needed. It's also helpful to shift that balance over-time.

Let's say your customer purchase latency is 60 days for the second order (you can get this figure from Repeat Customer Insights in the Latency Report).

That means on average, customers who order a second time do so about two months after their first order.

Near that time you'll want to favor pitches more. Say 45 days and on.

Near the beginning, your customer just ordered so you'll want to favor educational messages. Especially if shipping takes a bit of time. Say 25 days of educational messages.

So we now have

• 0 days after first order: order confirmations, etc
• 0-25 days: educational emails
• 26-44 days: ???
• 45-60+ days: pitches

In that middle area, you're going to want to vary the messages. Educational with soft pitches might be a good option.

(Hard pitches are "buy these products on sale", soft pitches are more product mentions: "when using product, it's best to...")

Say you email weekly, that's about three weeks of emails in that middle area.

• 0 days after first order: order confirmations, etc
• 0-25 days: educational emails
• 26-44 days: three educational soft-pitches
• 45-60+ days: pitches

Then depending on your brand, emails with product pitches might not fit your messaging tone so you can space out those final pitches too. Just make sure you have clear calls to action that'll lead to a purchase.

• 0 days after first order: order confirmations, etc
• 0-25 days: educational emails
• 26-44 days: three educational soft-pitches
• 45-60+ days: pitches alternating with educational soft-pitches

The last step could even be where you transition your new customer welcome campaign to your regular email campaign. You'll want to be clearly pitching products in your regular campaign though. This group will be right near their second order point and you don't want to miss that opportunity.

This isn't set in stone either. You should play with the sequences, email types, and timings. As long as you're measuring and using your metrics, you should be able to tell if a campaign is profitable or not.

Eric Davis