New research from Experian Marketing Services suggest the welcome email you send as part of your email marketing strategy can produce open rates four times higher than other promotional mailings.
While initial research on the speed of email-generated transactions found welcome messages lagged behind others such as abandoned cart notices, coupons and limited-time offers, additional research that further segmented welcome email data found high performance across metrics including opens, clicks, transactions and revenues.
The research shows welcome emails had an average click rate of 14.4%, compared with the bulk mailing average of just 2.7%. In total, welcome emails had a transaction rate of 0.94%, compared with just 0.1% for other mailings. Revenues per email were also significantly higher.
It takes more than simply sending a welcome message, the research warns, as bulk welcomes — sent at a fixed interval (e.g., once a week) to all new subscribers — performed consistently worse than messages sent immediately upon subscription. Sending real-time welcomes was even more powerful than adding a special offer in raising transaction rates and revenues.