One of the most common questions about email automation deals with a welcome series and how long it needs to be in order to introduce your brand, build audience familiarity and encourage ongoing engagement.

What Is A B2B Welcome Series

A welcome series is an automation that greets new subscribers who are added to an email marketing list. These types of automations have been used for well over two decades, either as part of an e-commerce purchase process or for general lead generation purposes.

In the world of B2B email marketing, we tend to have a longer education process than in the consumer industries. The variance here is wide, it could be as long as 12 months for some businesses. So if you’re a B2B organization, how many emails do you need to “welcome” your new subscribers? To answer that question, we need to dig a little deeper.

Considerations For Building a Welcome Series

First, how long is your typical customer journey from awareness through to purchase? If you’re selling a high ticket or complex product or service, your customers might start the purchase process a year before they are actually ready to close the deal. They may need a lot of education to understand options, features or find the right fit.  If you have a lot of smaller, quick purchases, your customer cycle could be just a week or two. While not all of this information is necessarily in a welcome series, you may need to build a series with various levers to accommodate future education needs. 

Next, what will your typical email cadence look like outside of the welcome series? Will you email your new subscribers weekly? Monthly? Daily? The frequency of sending your newsletters, product updates or company news weighs into their expectation for communications, and may affect what information you put in front of them in a welcome series. 

Finally, how were your subscribers added to your list for this welcome series? Names added from a CRM that has a sales qualification system might need to be treated differently than those that came in from a webinar, website download or a trade show booth sign up. Understanding the source of the name makes a difference in what information they need in the welcome series, and how long you need to extend that process. In some cases, variations of the welcome series need to be built based on the list source and audience archetypes.

The Perfect Welcome Series…For You

There is no one perfect answer for every organization when it comes to creating a welcome series. The process and content is as specific to your list and your organization as needed to meet the goal. Overall, we rarely create a series with fewer than 3 emails, however some organizations will run automations that run with many creatives for months. The final goal of the welcome series should be to build brand recognition and engagement with your audience. The recipe for that should be tailored to your company, offerings and audience.

Need to boost engagement by adding a welcome series to your email marketing program? We’re Mailchimp Pro Partners and email experts with more than two decades of email experience. Reach out today and find out how we can help.