How to Create a Welcome Email Campaign for Your WordPress Website

Encouraging website visitors to share their email addresses with you is a smart move. Once someone joins your email list, you can reach out to them at any time. That means you can let them know about new content and offers on your site. However, before you do anything else, you’ll want to send your subscribers a welcome email.

Welcome email campaigns enable you to set the tone for the type of messages you’ll be sending to your list. You can thank subscribers for joining, share freebies with them, and start establishing a relationship. If audience members know that your emails are worth opening, they’ll be more likely to engage with them.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how welcome emails work and what their benefits are. Then we’ll show you how to set up a welcome email series for your WordPress.com website. Let’s get to work!

Table of Contents:

1. An Introduction to Welcome Emails (And Their Benefits)
2. What Are Welcome Email Campaigns?
3. How to Create a Welcome Email Campaign for Your WordPress Website (In 6 Steps)
   1. Step 1: Sign Up for a MailChimp Account
   2. Step 2: Create a Mailchimp “Audience”
   3. Step 3: Connect Mailchimp with WordPress.com
   4. Step 4: Add an Email Signup Form to WordPress.com
   5. Step 5: Design a Welcome Email
   6. Step 6: Automate Your Email Campaign
4. Conclusion

An Introduction to Welcome Emails (And Their Benefits)

The concept of a welcome email is simple. When you subscribe to an email list or sign up for an account with a website, you’ll often get a quick message that welcomes you to the fold:

These emails fulfill several purposes. They show that you’re polite, and offer a personal connection for new subscribers. Plus, you can use them to provide subscribers with information about what they should expect. If you use emails to share news about your site or information about offers and sales, welcome messages let you tell subscribers to keep an eye out for them.

Laying this groundwork is essential, because a lot of people don’t open all the emails they get. In fact, most businesses report that only around 15-25 percent of their subscribers open the emails they send.

That number might sound bleak, but it’s not all that bad if you have an email list with hundreds or thousands of subscribers. To improve your email open rate, you’ll need to make sure your messages offer real value and are as engaging as possible. Welcome emails enable you to demonstrate that value up front, to ensure that subscribers don’t ignore further messages.

Some businesses go all in and give new subscribers offers right off the bat to get them hooked:

You can also take things a step further and send more than one welcome message. In fact, some businesses send entire welcome campaigns. Let’s talk about how those campaigns work.

What Are Welcome Email Campaigns?

An email campaign is a succession of messages that you can automate so they’re sent at specific times. For example, you can create a welcome email that users will get right after subscribing or signing up for your WordPress.com website. Then you can create a message that users will get one day after signing up, and another that gets delivered the day after that.

Here’s an example of a welcome email that tells readers to expect additional messages in the next few days:

By sending multiple onboarding messages, you increase the chance that users will want to open them to find out more about your business. Moreover, subscribers will get used to seeing your messages in their inboxes.

There’s no hard and fast rule about how many emails constitute a campaign. You can have a welcome email campaign that’s just two messages long, or a full series spanning days. The only caveat is that your welcome campaign needs to provide value. Otherwise, subscribers might delete your emails without reading them.

How to Create a Welcome Email Campaign for Your WordPress Website (In 6 Steps)

WordPress is capable of sending “transactional” emails out of the box. Those are the emails that users get when they subscribe to your blog or decide to follow a comments chain. However, WordPress doesn’t come with email marketing functionality built in.

That’s because there are a lot of fantastic email marketing platforms that offer great services at accessible prices. Let’s talk about one platform you can integrate with WordPress.com in a matter of minutes.

Step 1: Sign Up for a MailChimp Account

There are a lot of email marketing services to choose from. By “email marketing service”, we mean a platform that enables you to:

1. Add email signup forms to your website
2. Create multiple email lists
3. Put together individual emails and full campaigns
4. Automate emails 

That’s just scratching the surface of what a great email marketing service can do. Since you’re using WordPress.com, we recommend that you check out Mailchimp:

Mailchimp offers a lot of services, but it’s best known for email marketing. Not only does it integrate with WordPress.com, but it also offers one of the most generous plugin-enabled plans on the market.

Traditionally, email marketing services charge you either by number of emails or a monthly flat fee. With Mailchimp, you can grow an email list of up to 2,000 subscribers on its plugin-enabled plan. That makes it a fantastic option for new websites.

For the rest of this tutorial, we’ll assume that you’re using a Mailchimp account. The plugin-enabled plan will enable you to send a single welcome email. To send a full automated campaign, you’ll need to opt for one of its paid tiers.

If you want to try out Mailchimp, go ahead and sign up for a free account. Once you’re logged in, move on to the next step.

Step 2: Create a Mailchimp “Audience”

Mailchimp enables you to set up multiple email lists or “audiences”. To create your first audience, go to your Mailchimp dashboard and navigate to the Audience > Audience Dashboard tab. Once the page loads, click on Create Audience:

Mailchimp will ask you for some details about that new email list or audience. For instance, you get to choose a name for your audience, and decide what email address to display on your campaigns:

You can also configure a confirmation email for new subscribers by ticking the Enable double opt-in setting:

When you save your new audience, Mailchimp will show that it currently has zero email addresses. To fix that, you’ll need to add an email signup form to your WordPress.com website.

Step 3: Connect Mailchimp with WordPress.com

At this point, you can return to your WordPress.com dashboard. Then go to Tools > Marketing > Connections, and look for the option labeled Mailchimp. Click on the Connect button next to that option:

A window will pop up asking you to authorize WordPress.com to connect with your Mailchimp account:

Authorize the connection by clicking on Allow. Once the connection is established, reload the page and open the Mailchimp tab again. 

Now you’ll see a drop-down menu that enables you to choose what Mailchimp audience you want to connect with your website:

Once you select a list, WordPress.com will let you add a sign up form for it to any page or post. Let’s take a look at how to do that.

Step 4: Add an Email Signup Form to WordPress.com

Consider where you want to add your email sign up form on your website, and open the WordPress editor for that page or post. You can select any location you want, and add a Mailchimp block to it:

Once you add the block, your page should look something like this:

As with any other block, you get access to several customization options. Feel free to tweak the signup form until it fits with your site’s style. When you’re done, you can start working on your welcome email campaign.

Step 5: Design a Welcome Email

Now, return to Mailchimp and access the Campaign tab in your dashboard. Then click on Create Campaign:

Mailchimp will ask what type of campaign you want to create. Select the Email > Regular option, and give a name to your campaign:

On the next page, choose who you want to send your campaign to by clicking on Add Recipients and selecting your recently-created email list. Then click on Add from, and set a sender name and email address for the campaign:

Click on Add Subject to create a title for your first email:

Now you’re ready to get to work on the body of the welcome email. To do so, select Design Email. You’ll get access to a drag-and-drop email builder that’s pretty similar to the WordPress.com editor:

You can select and edit individual modules (just like blocks), and rearrange them using your mouse. Learning the ins and outs of the editor shouldn’t take long, and Mailchimp offers a full tutorial to help you design your first email.

Once you’re satisfied with your welcome email, click on Continue at the top of the screen to save it. Mailchimp will ask you what you want to do with that email, so go ahead and select the Finish later option:

Right now, you have a welcome email ready, which you can go ahead and send. To create a full welcome campaign with automation, proceed to the next step. 

Step 6: Automate Your Email Campaign

Now that you have a single welcome email ready to go, jump to the Automations > Customer Journeys tab. Set a name for your new automation and click on Start Building:

On the next screen, click on Choose A Starting Point:

Mailchimp will ask you to decide what user action will kick off the automation you’re configuring. Since you want to set up a welcome email campaign, select the Signs up option:

Now you’ll get access to a visual map for your email automation. The starting point of the map is the action you’ve just selected. You can add further actions by clicking on the + sign below them. 

For this example, we added the Send email action from the left-hand menu:

If you click on Gets email, you’ll be able to create a new email or select one from an existing campaign:

Opt for the option labeled Use a Previous Campaign as a Template, and select the welcome email that you created during the previous step. 

At this stage, you have the option to keep adding more emails to your automated campaign. The first email will be sent as soon as a user signs up to your list. However, you can configure further emails to be sent later. To do so, add Time delays between one email and the next:

You can configure time delays on any schedule you want. As a rule of thumb, you might want to wait at least a day between emails in a campaign (to avoid looking ‘spammy’ to your subscribers).

When you add new emails to the user journey, Mailchimp will ask if you want to use a saved campaign or create a new message. Since you’ve only created one email so far, you’ll need to design further ones from scratch (but you already know how!).

Once you’re happy with your automated campaign, save and publish it! Now you have a fully automated welcome email campaign ready to go.

Conclusion

Creating an email campaign might sound intimidating, but it’s easier than you’d expect. Moreover, a welcome email campaign enables you to “hook” new subscribers, and show them why they should keep reading future messages.

Since you’re using WordPress.com, we recommend that you check out Mailchimp. This email marketing service integrates with WordPress.com easily, and it enables you to use visual builders to design emails and map automated welcome campaigns.