What NOT to do when building a New Customer Welcome Series
The New Customer Welcome Series, those first touches to new customers after their first purchase, tell a lot about the brand and what’s important to them. Like all relationships, it’s important to set the right intentions and build a foundation that can grow and last long term. Sadly, most brands miss the boat. During a recent project I took a look back at old examples and tracked a bunch of new ones to refresh my POV and best practices guidance. Coming out of that work, these are the most common mistakes brands make in their New Customer Welcome series.
1. Brands Don’t Do Enough To Coach and Educate Their New Customers
Most brand wrongly assume that new customers know everything they need to know. The problem with this assumption is that Lead Nurture streams, and acquisition marketing in general, focus solely on providing just enough info to drive a purchase.
Now that you’ve got that new customer the Welcome Series gives you space to expand the content and overall experience. It’s time to go deeper and act like a guide. It’s prime time to coach new customers on the brand story, how to maximize the product value, how to engage in the community and what to expect over the longer term of the relationship.
So, what should you be coaching? I recommend looking at your higher value and higher engaged customers. What are the top 3–5 high value traits they exhibit? What was their first and second purchase? How engaged are they with your community across social media, email and other direct channels? Have they referred friends and family? These traits should guide your creative and messaging, along with providing peer examples to coach your new customers towards emulating these best customers.
2. Most New Customer Welcome Series Are Too Short
The stickiest products and services form habits and become defaults for the users. What’s your default shopping site? Who’s your default streaming portal? Which social media platform do you obsessively check dozens of times as day? Each of these companies have become habits.
It’s scientifically proven, like the Earth is round and our climate is changing, that it takes at least 21 days to form a new habit. And the ideal timeline is 66 days or more. And your Welcome Series is just a couple emails you send for a week? If you want to build the foundation for a long-term customer relationship and work towards top of mind or default status, you need to do more for longer and set expectations accordingly.
3. Creative Is Often Disorganized And Crowded
Brands try to pack a lot into a New Customer Welcome Series. They want to build rapport, make the customer feel good about the purchase, get them to follow on social, maybe make a referral or buy something else. And they want to do all of this in two emails in a seven day period? It’s no wonder how this leads to long disjointed emails packed with a mix of generic brand content, impersonal offers and some other items forced in by merchandizing or an eager executive with a little pull. It’s frantic and destined to fail.
The good news though is that there are three simple ways to fix this. Start by solving the first two issues noted above. Define a clear content strategy and information hierarchy based on those high value customer traits while extending the series to actually give space to build recognition and habits over a reasonable timeline.
The third piece of this puzzle is a little harder pill for most brands to swallow. All new customers should be excluded from ALL other marketing and sales communications for the duration of the New Customer Welcome Series. No other one-off campaigns of any kind that could interrupt the flow or distract the new customer. Nothing else but the Welcome Series touches.
This doesn’t mean you won’t get to sell them more stuff. You’ll have plenty of space and time in the Welcome Series, but you’ll have to be smarter about personalizing the offerings as you work them into a dynamic content module.
4. Underestimating The Audience Growth and Revenue Opportunity
Did you know that Welcome Series emails generate 320% more revenue per email than your standard campaigns? And do you know that sending a series of Welcome Series touches drives 51% more revenue than single emails?
If someone argues that you could potentially lose revenue by excluding the new customers from some ad hoc sales email, just shoot back with these stats. Building a proper New Customer Welcome Series, giving it the right amount of time to connect, and including relevant offers within that series is guaranteed to outperform any # of whimsical sales campaigns they will miss. And you’ll likely have better customer relationships since you’re pounding them with emails shouting at them to buy more stuff AGAIN and AGAIN AND AGAIN.
And don’t forget about audience growth too. Ask for referrals, reviews or shares while the relationship is still fresh and the customer wants to show off their shiny new things.
5. Living Omnichannel Dreams In A Channel Siloed World
It’s a sad fact that most enterprise org structures are siloed by channel or lifecycle state and prohibit most things cross-channel, let alone anything resembling the seamless omnichannel experience customers expect. And in most cases the individual owners are discouraged from breaking down these silos by their annual goals and KPIs. It’s just not customer-centric or built for the way the outside world works.
A successful New Customer Welcome experience can’t be successful if it’s isolated to email only. A real journey should cover a mix of owned and direct channels like email, .com, SMS/MMS, App, Social and call center or DM. If you’re not running the series across at least 2–3 of these today, get working in a solution and focus on the greater good of the customer experience and your own professional growth. Don’t worry about scale, solve for simple things like sending a DM to new customers thanking them and welcoming them to the community. Have an intern send a simple Thank You postcard when a new customer purchases or completes one of the tasks in the Welcome Series. Get creative and scrappy to prove it CAN happen and there’s value to the customer, and the business in turn.
So, what should a brand do?
These are five simple principles to follow when building or optimizing a New Customer Welcome Series.
Take Your Time: It takes at minimum of 22 days to form a new habit. A New Customer Welcome Series should be at least that long to provide enough time, touches and engagement frequency to coach users and give them value.
Best Customer Coaching: Define the top 3–5 traits of a “best customer” by value, engagement and profile completeness. Use these to guide the coaching content, CTAs and measures of success throughout the series and early customer lifespan.
Focus: include one key message, CTA and desired action for each touch. Users are starved for time and attention, so limit distractions.
Cross-Channel: leverage as many owned channels to ensure you break through the noise and let your users customize the relationship. Include strong CTAs to download the app, follow on social, enroll in SMS, etc. to ensure multiple contact channels and permissioning.
Growth: make sure to include at least one request for referrals along with 1–2 relevant and well placed Upsell and Cross-sell modules to boost sales and customer value.
