Onboarding Emails

Onboarding emails educate your new or soon-to-be customer about your products and give them a glimpse into what your brand is all about.

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Onboarding emails are meant to engage, educate, and provide a positive experience for potential and new customers. They help customers use your products and promote repeat purchases, thus increasing customer retention. As such, they play an important role in the customer lifecycle.

Inspiration for your own onboarding email sequence

New customers don’t turn into repeat customers unless they have a great experience interacting with your brand and products. That’s why onboarding emails are such an important part of your email marketing. They allow you to welcome the customers, show them why your brand is amazing, and teach them how to get the most out of their purchase.

They can also be used to increase engagement by suggesting actions to take, or to generate more revenue through upsells, for example.

There are many interesting strategies to test and what works well will depend heavily on your audience. We took a dive into the MailCharts database and hand-selected some great onboarding email examples you can use as inspiration for your own campaigns.

Show them why you're a good choice

Eyewear brand Warby Parker sends website visitors this simple yet nicely designed email once they’ve created an account. The subject line “You’re in”) is both clear and creates a sense of belonging while the body of the email lets the recipient know the signup process was successful.

The rest of the onboarding content consists of a list of key benefits of having a Warby Parker account. Each benefit is easy to grasp thanks to the basic but fun graphics, limited text, and individual call to action.

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Invite people to engage with your community

This onboarding email by food subscription service Purple Carrot is a great example of how you can use subject lines to instantly bring your message across. The brand invites the email recipient to join its social media communities. Invitations like this make new users feel welcome and increase customer retention as the people who join your communities will keep getting exposed to your brand.

Purple Carrot’s “Let’s be friends” is such a warm welcome message, and it also does a great job of specifying who their communities are for: “like-minded plant-based eaters”. People want to be part of something special and your communities will have more success when you make it clear that they’re not just for everyone.

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Share real customer experiences with the product

Customer loyalty isn’t built in a day. It’s based on positive experiences and trust. One way to build that trust is by sharing social proof as part of your boarding process. Rent the Runway does this amazingly well with this email that is the 4th in an onboarding email sequence of 12.

The brand combines quotes from paying customers with photos of those customers in RTR outfits and presents the quotes as tips for the new customer to get the most out of their membership. It’s social proof and helpful content in one.

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Teach them how to use your product

Coffee subscription company MistoBox can’t brew its customers’ coffee for them, but it can it can improve their customer experience by giving them step-by-step instructions in the form of video tutorials.

Showing customers how to use your product or service also allows you to answer common questions (taking some workload off your customer support team) and highlight key features that they may have already forgotten about since they bought from you. On top of that, it makes for engaging content that you can use to drive traffic to your website. For that reason, it’s a good idea to host your explainer video or explanatory blog post on your site instead of including it completely within the email. Not all email clients are able to play videos either, and a whole post would make for a way-too-long email.

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Promote your app

If you have an app and are sending a sequence of multiple onboarding emails, consider dedicating one email to directing new users toward your app.

We love the pun (“So appy together”) in the subject line of this email by cosmetics brand Lush as well as the clear call to action at the bottom of the email with links to the App Store and Google Play. The email’s to-the-point copy invokes a sense of FOMO (“never miss the latest Lush news”) and combines that with the benefits new users can get from downloading the app.

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Introduce your products

There is no reason onboarding emails shouldn’t be promotional emails. After all, part of user onboarding is introducing them to your products, isn’t it?

Bed Bath & Beyond aims to bring more customers to its online store by listing and linking to different brands it sells. If you’re one brand selling different products, you could list your most popular products, or you could list different types of products for different segments of your audience. Men, women, and kids is a typical one for fashion retailers.

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Highlight a special product or service

Do you have a secret weapon? Something your competitors don’t have? Make sure to flaunt it! As part of the onboarding experience, outdoor brand Backcountry lets new subscribers know that they can get advice from true outdoor experts on their upcoming purchases. They share a dedicated phone number at the top of the email, making it super easy for recipients to get help.

Providing this type of advice makes it more likely that the customer buys and that they’ll be happy with their purchase. It also allows you to collect customer data beyond the typical metrics your email marketing tools can track.

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Remind the customer about the welcome offer

If your initial onboarding email included a welcome offer but the new subscriber or new customer hasn’t taken you up on it yet, send them a reminder.

ALDO addresses its recipient by name and introduces a sense of urgency (“it disappears soon!”) in its welcome email to get the recipient to act. A welcome offer is a great way to get new leads or first-time customers to take the next step in their customer journey.

This email of the email welcome series itself is simple but the animated confetti GIF at the top captures the recipient’s attention well.

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Share about your rewards program

Do you have a loyalty program? Dedicate one of your automated onboarding emails to promoting it. In this onboarding email, beauty brand Ulta shows the new user how saving points can get them discounts on their next purchases, and how they can earn even more points if they get and pay with the Ultamate Rewards credit card. There’s one CTA that clearly outlines the next steps for the recipient to take: “Learn More & Apply Today.”

A rewards program is a good way to increase long-term engagement from customers as it incentivizes them to stick around and keep shopping with you. The fine print in this email with links back to the website for further reading also ensures the recipient has as much information they need to understand how the program works.

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Talk about the production process

If there’s something special about what you sell or how you produce it, an easy way to create more engaged customers is by making them feel invested in your brand. Wanderer Bracelets does this by sharing its production process in this onboarding email example.

The video of the hands of a craftsman at work adds a personal touch and shows new customers exactly how their bracelets are made. The email copy goes deeper into the process and lists some of the top reasons why buying a Wanderer Bracelet is a great idea. They’re made by hand using organic material, are adventure-ready, and on top of that, every purchase supports “sustainable work for artisans in Bali.” The brand’s sustainable character is emphasized even more by the logos at the bottom of the email of causes it participates in.

There’s one clear main CTA that invites the reader to take a specific action: “shop handmade bracelets.”

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Strategic Tips for Onboarding Emails

As you can tell from the email onboarding examples above, there are many different ways in which you can create effective onboarding emails. Which strategy to go with depends largely on the goal of your onboarding as well as on your audience.

The more emails in your onboarding campaign, the more ways in which you can invite recipients to take action. This could mean inviting them to your loyalty program, gathering enough data on them so you can segment them into more specific audiences, or offering them a discount on their next purchase.

Whichever approach you choose for your user onboarding, here are a few best practices you’ll want to follow.

Trigger emails based on on-site events

Onboarding emails are usually most effective when sent after a customer makes a first-time purchase or after they’ve requested more information through a form on your website. Most email service providers (ESPs) allow you to trigger an onboarding campaign based on these types of events. If not, you or someone on your dev team will need to set up the API with your site to retrieve that data.

Whatever you do, don’t spam your customers

Keep your total onboarding email marketing automation relatively short (between 4-8 emails) and spread it out over a reasonable period of time. If you send too many emails at once, you risk annoying recipients, being sent to their spam folder, and damaging your sender reputation.

Onboarding emails are important emails. They allow you to make a great first impression via… or not. If you’re uncertain about how intensely you should be emailing during that first email campaign your new subscriber will receive, it’s better to gently nudge people and test increasing your sending volume over time, than it is to inundate them with emails straight away.

Be aware of other marketing emails sent during the same period

If you have other active promotional emails running at the same time as your onboarding drip sequence, you could include additional filters to the promotional campaigns to exclude newer users currently in the onboarding flow

Say you have an onboarding email sequence that lasts two weeks and starts when a user signs up, you could exclude the users who have been created in the past couple of weeks from the promotional email campaign.

Use onboarding email templates for easy testing

Having templates for your different automated email sequences is a must. These templates act as the default you run your tests against. Whenever a test results in a new winning variation, you adapt your templates.

You can have one set of onboarding templates for each of your onboarding email campaigns, or you can create different onboarding email templates per audience segment.

Experiment with subject lines, email design, CTAs, and the strategies in the onboarding email examples above to create the best possible onboarding sequence for your brand.