Considering the fact that more than half the people who visit a website leave within 15 seconds, it’s quite a feat to interest a person to stay long enough to create an account. And once you do, capturing the momentum from that initial account creation is extremely important, as people are most engaged shortly after signing up.
Experian’s Welcome Emails Best Practices Guide notes that “Welcome emails see more than 3 times the transactions and revenue per email over regular promotional mailings.” In short, the emails you send right after a sign-up will drive the most engagement and revenue. A welcome series is a great way to keep open rates high and grab that first purchase; however, eye-catching emails with relevant content can begin as soon as you send your new sign-up his or her first email: the account creation confirmation email.
Customers who create an account should be treated like gold, as it indicates their interest in a relationship with your site, which is something you want to nurture. For example, if you are focused on e-commerce, account creation can suggest an intent to buy, since it’s easier for customers to check out with all of their information already stored. And what better start to your new relationship than an email speaking perfectly to a customer’s interests and tastes?
Using dynamic content enhances your account creation confirmation email with personalized predictive product recommendations. Product recommendations populating at time of open, based on each person’s browsing behavior and purchases, will prove to your subscribers that you understand them. Displaying items that speak exactly to their tastes will keep them opening, clicking through, and purchasing.
You may be thinking, “Wait a minute, I already send a confirmation email when they opt-in.” But an account creation confirmation email is a bit different than a double-opt-in email. While the purpose of a double-opt-in email is to confirm that the subscriber really intended to sign up, the account creation email can be more content driven, since subscribers have already filled out a form with their personal information. A simple “Your account is ready!” (as seen in our example email above) works well, especially if you use dynamic content to saturate the message with up-to-the-minute social updates. Enhance the short and sweet statement with a dynamic social block, pulling in your company’s most recent social feed.
In an article on Recency Marketing by LSC, the writer explores the importance of utilizing account creation emails as a mechanism to drive sales and engagement:
Tracking hundreds of companies across our platform we see that the very first email sent to a new subscriber, when sent within minutes or seconds of the sign-up, has the highest open rate, click rate, and purchase rate of any email a company ever sends to its list. For e‐commerce and catalog companies we see purchase rates for new subscriber emails as much as 20 times higher than any other campaign the company sends over the life of the customer. Yet many companies still foolishly throw away their introductory email with a simple ‘Thanks for signing up’ no call to action, no special new subscriber offer, often not even html.
For businesses and organizations outside of the e-commerce realm, putting a strategy in place for account creation emails is equally important. Using predictive content recommendations, you can tap into each individual's interests by recommending highly personalized articles, blog posts, research reports, webinars, and other content found on your site. With so much information on the web, the ability to customize a tailored reading list for each subscriber is extremely powerful, and is sure to keep each new subscriber opening.
Whether e-commerce, non-profit, educational, travel related, or other, utilizing the underused and highly viewed account creation email boosts email marketing efforts and kickstarts your relationship with each new subscriber. Adding dynamic content to transactional emails such as this is an easy way to automate relevant and fresh content each time your audience opens. Show them you know them with predictive product or content recommendations and dynamic social feeds.
