How to Set Up Automated New Member “Welcome Series” Emails

When a new member joins your membership organization, statistics show that email communication is not a nice-to-have; it’s the bare minimum. 74% of subscribers expect immediate confirmation, and perhaps more striking, the average open rate for welcome emails is 80%. 

Based on these statistics, your new member welcome email will likely be one of the most visible communications your association sends. By crafting a thoughtful strategy, you can elevate this message from a simple confirmation to a value-add series that sets the tone for a successful member journey. Let’s walk through four critical steps in your welcome email series strategy. 

Strategize Your Email Sequence

From the moment a new member joins your organization, make engagement and retention your top priorities. When you frame your welcome series with this lens, several objectives become clear: 

• Capitalize on onboarding momentum: Build on the excitement that inspired members to sign up in the first place, and plant the seeds for future engagement. 
• Demonstrate immediate member ROI: Take advantage of the high visibility this email is likely to receive and reinforce membership value by showcasing member benefits. 
• Establish your association’s brand: Offering clear, helpful communication early creates a positive bias toward the association, which is vital for long-term loyalty and your association’s reputation.

Setting The Cadence

To achieve these goals and maximize visibility, your welcome series should act as a guided tour through your association. Bloomerang’s guide to email marketing recommends a four-email welcome series as the industry standard. 

Applying the framework to member organizations, we’ve outlined the purpose of each email below:

1. Digital Handshake (Day 0): This initial communication confirms membership, immediately delivers login credentials, underscores your mission, and provides a quick-start guide to accessing benefits. 
2. Connections and Community (Day 3): To create emotional resonance, dial into the authentic, professional relationships your organization fosters. Highlight peer-to-peer networking opportunities, whether in-person mixers or virtual meet-and-greets, that integrate the new member into your community.
3. Featured Resources (Day 7): Connect new members with useful tools, like a job board or certification tracker, that immediately solve a common industry problem for them. Doing so makes your organization “stickier” in the long run, meaning members are more likely to see the long-term value of staying involved. 
4. Action Opportunity (Day 14): Give new members a nudge to dive deeper with an invitation to step up. It could be as bold as joining a committee or as simple as following your pages on social media. Either way, members take ownership of their involvement.

Writing the Content

As your team starts writing the copy for your emails, remember to balance valuable information with brevity so the emails don’t get lost in the shuffle of their busy, professional lives. 

Starting with the subject line, writing a hook between 35 and 45 characters satisfies both mobile and desktop best practices. Don’t put it in all caps or overuse punctuation. Avoid phrases like “100% Free” or “Act now” that trigger spam filters. Additionally, every email in your welcome sequence should have fewer than 100 words in the body copy and contain a single CTA.

Enable Automation

To deliver your welcome series immediately upon a new member joining and scale it as your association grows, you need the right technical infrastructure. Connecting your membership management software and your email tools lets your team take advantage of all the automation capabilities that make a compelling email strategy possible.

Ensure these features and practices are in place:

• Workflow trigger: Initiate an automated workflow when a new member record is created (either manually or automatically from the membership portal) in your database.
• Data-driven personalization: Using merge tags to label member records with their specific industry niche or chapter enables segmentation within your system. 
• Centralize data: Avoid silos and ensure that engagement data from your email software is stored in your database alongside member records. 

Additionally, your email software should prioritize mobile responsiveness. Configure emails properly for phone screens by using vertically oriented layouts, large fonts, and buttons that are easy to tap. 

Capitalize on Engagement Opportunities

Not only does a welcome email series take a crucial first step towards engagement by welcoming new members into your community and directing them towards benefits, but it also illuminates the roadmap for the entire member journey.

How members interact with the welcome series provides valuable insights to help you improve their experience and optimize future communication. Once members are onboarded and as they get more involved in programs, events, and committees, you’ll build on these insights, but this initial engagement data even highlights future retention rates. 

With data analytics tools, your team can:

• Identify friction points, like broken links or overly complex instructions, that discourage members from opening emails halfway through the series.
• Predict member renewal trends based on early participation levels. Monitoring click patterns and other activity against the first-year renewal rate can project future trends.
• Initiate tailored follow-up flows based on members’ interactions with the welcome email series. Automatically launch your next engagement initiative based on what members indicated interest in. 

For the specific metrics, consider tracking click-through and conversion rates. Click-through rates let you know whether members find the resources you’ve linked valuable. The conversion rate, on whether members are completing their profiles, for instance, is also a leading indicator for future engagement. 

As you apply the insights and determine what is most impactful, AI tools for nonprofits and associations streamline what would otherwise be a time-consuming process. Draft variations of welcome copy for different member segments, or A/B-test with AI tools, but always have you or your team review for accuracy and your brand’s voice. 

You can also leverage the automation and data analytics practices you apply to a welcome series for future communications, like membership renewal reminders. Leaning into the tech tools and data innovations at your fingertips means your team will have more time and better information with which to invest in creating an authentic community within your membership organization.