
7 Tips To Create A Winning Welcome Email Nurture Sequence
7 TIPS TO CREATE A WINNING WELCOME EMAIL NURTURE SEQUENCE
A welcome email nurture sequence is a great way to start to build deeper relationships with your email list, and in this post I’ll share 7 tips to create a winning welcome email nurture sequence.
Before we dive in to those 7 tips, let me refresh your mind about why email content is a great way to build a community of new leads for your small business, leads who can become potential buyers of your products and services, and I’ll also cover why your mailing list is one of the most powerful tools you have in your small business marketing strategy to increase sales and revenue to your brand.
WHY YOUR MAILING LIST IS IMPORTANT
Whilst many small business owners focus a large part of their marketing on making sales to followers on social media platforms, those businesses who understand sales well know that selling on social to cold leads (ie followers or non-followers who have not had a long, lengthy relationship with you), is a much harder marketing strategy to make work organically, than using a series of emails to build know, like and trust via marketing emails to every email lead on their list.
You can read more about why you need a mailing list in your small business here.
Your email list should comprise leads who are much more your target audience than your social followers may be, and the very fact that subscribers to your list have given you their email information in the first place, marks those people as much greater potential customers over your followers on social.

YOUR GOAL WITH YOUR MAILING LIST
Your goal as a female small business owner is to make sure you’re driving people to your mailing list as a key priority in your small business.
Once people have given you their email addresses and have been added to your list, you should then have a follow-up email sequence in place to immediately start to engage your new subscribers, rather than letting them sit on your list without contact from you – which inevitably turns them back into cold leads who are unlikely to ever buy.
You need to keep the leads on your mailing list warm and engaged, and a welcome email nurture sequence can be the start of that process.
One key place you should focus on driving people to your list from, is social media. You can learn more about how to drive people to your mailing list from social by clicking through to this blog post.
The best way to bring people to your mailing list is through an opt-in offer with some sort of free trial, free offer, free download, or discount against something they can purchase in your small business.
Once you’ve got any new email subscribers on your list, your goal is to send those leads through a welcome email sequence, or an email nurture sequence to help those leads get to know, like and trust you, so that they become familiarised with receiving great emails from you, and you then have the opportunity to start to use your email nurture campaigns to introduce your products and services to the leads on your mailing list.
If you need to learn where to start a mailing list for free in your small business, I cover than in another blog post that you can read here.
When anyone joins your mailing list, the worst thing you can do is ignore them. You need to stay top-of-mind with your subscribers. You can do this by creating an email nurture sequence that runs on autopilot any time new leads join your list.
Your email nurture sequence can be as long as you want it to be, but I would suggest bare minimum an effective email sequence should be at least 5 emails in a sequence, and those 5 emails should be sent to nurture leads over the course of 12 days at the most. However, the more emails you can send to nurture your leads, the better.
The ultimate goal of a nurture sequence is to encourage your leads to stick around, open your emails to read them, and ultimately take further action with you by buying in to your products and services.
Before we dive in to 7 tips to create a winning nurture email sequence, remember this. At best 6% of your followers over on social media see your content. Whereas average open and read rates for emails land between 20 and 30%. That’s a significantly higher volume of people who will personally open and read your emails, than followers who will see and engage with your content on social media.
This is just one great example why it’s essential to have an automated email sequence as part of your email marketing strategy, and why your email strategy should be a signifiant part of your daily business life.

Let’s look At 7 Tips To Create A Winning Email Nurture Sequence that you should have in place when any new lead joins your list.
1. Set a Goal For Your Email Nurture Sequence
There’s simply no point putting together a nurture email sequence of random email content just to try and get some emails out. So first step is to set a goal for your email nurture sequence.
That goal could be to encourage your leads to buy your products or services, to engage with you through emails by replying to you, to complete a survey to give you feedback and market research, to take advantage of a free offer or offers to help build your credibility.
So first choose the goal you want your email nurture sequence to achieve. Next is to decide the number of emails there will be in your sequence. Once you know your goal, and have an idea of how many emails you’ll send through your sequence, you then start to craft each email, focusing on having a great subject line in each that will encourage people to open the emails.
You should also have great, engaging content in your emails, and also further entice your leads to stay tuned by tempting them with what’s coming up in the next email, so that you encourage open rates to stay high.
2. Add Variety to Your Email Nurture Sequence
Don’t just send a series of emails in your email sequence that are all about selling. That’ll be the quickest route to people on your list unsubscribing. With each email you send, mix the content up, and keep the emails engaging. You can share valuable information, offer case studies of customers or clients who have purchased your products or services, you can provide bonus digital downloads or bonus videos your leads will find useful that will further enhance your reputation with them.
You can create a welcome message in the first email letting your leads know you appreciate them being on your list, and telling them a little about you and your company. You can tell stories, add humour, run surveys, get feedback, direct subscribers to blog posts, podcasts, social media posts. You can give recommendations, show some behind the scenes, talk about challenges your audience may be facing. Nothing is off limits, as long as you are moving your leads through an email series that takes them towards your end goal (see 1. above).
3. Be Personal in your email series
Address your leads by first name – people are more likely to open emails that are personalised to them. You can even use the merge facility in your email builder to add the person’s first name in the subject line – that can help your email stand out in their mailbox.
Best practices with email campaigns is to use the word ‘you’ in the email content, and not to use the work ‘I’ too much. Your email should be tailored to your lead, not to yourself.
4. Short N Sweet
Emails are a great opportunity to advance your relationship with your audience. But no-one has the time or patience to read emails that end up looking like some enclyclopaedic comprehensive guide. Keep the paragraphs of your emails short and to the point.
Use bullet points, headings and sub headings that guide your leads through the email, enabling them to scan and ready quickly. Use plain text emails without fancy fonts that can be difficult to read. Adding images and/or gifs can help with flow and keep the reader interested.
5. Use a Call To Action
Every email you send out in your email nurture sequence should have a call to action. And each email may have a different call to action, ultimately leading to the end goal of your email sequence.
In one or more emails your call to action might simply be to tell your leads about the next step – ie: what’s coming up in the next email, when it will be landing, and to encourage them to keep an eye open for that email.
You may have a call to action asking your lead to reply to your email to give you feedback, or ask you a question.
You may have something special to offer during the email nurture sequence – an extra bonus or training or voucher for example that you encourage your leads to take advantage of.
At some point during your email sequence you should introduce your first paid for products/services, and they should be the right products/services for that nurture sequence. Make sure any call to action you use is clear and concise and tells the lead in the simplest way, the action you want them to take.
6. Be Consistent
You must have an email sequence that is consistent. There’s no point sending email 1 out on day one (as soon as a lead joins your list), then sending email 2 out a fortnight later.
Your email nurture sequence should keep you in the mind of your leads, and should be used to educate your leads that you are going to be in contact with them often. As a minimum each step of your email marketing automation should be sent no longer than 3-5 days apart. Daily is even better.
7. Be Patient.
Email nurturing takes time, effort and consistency. You need clear strategy to build out email drip campaigns in a nurture sequence, and results in terms of capturing sales from your email nurture sequence can take time.
Don’t be afraid to keep returning to your email marketing campaigns to keep tweaking them, to make them better.
The first time you set up an email nurture sequence you may not be perfect, but the good news is the more you use any sort of engagement email sequence, the more you keep learning how to become better at sending emails to your list, the more responsive your leads will become to your emails.
As that happens, you’ll find that the lead nurturing campaigns you create will start to bring you a greater conversion rate in terms of open rates, click throughs and sales in your small business, far surpassing what you could achieve organically on social platforms, if you learn how to create great email sequences to build brand loyalty with the people on your mailing list.
Start your email nurture sequence today. Have strategy in place to welcome new leads who join your list, and then take those leads on a journey with you through automated email sequences to help educate them that you are going to stay in touch, to offer great email content that marks you out as an expert in your field, and to keep you top of their minds in their mailboxes, so that you become the go to expert they start to purchase from through the emails you send.Â
When you’re ready to go deeper, and to take you small business to greater success in the online space to become unstoppable in your small business, maximise your results and limit daily stress, anxiety and struggle, start by choosing one of my free small business guides below (note: you should choose both – they each have great value!).
Jenny