Welcome series

A welcome series is the first thing worth automating. This page gives you a complete four-email recipe over about two weeks, with the delays between each step and what belongs in each email. Copy it as written, then adjust the wording to your own product.

The shape of the sequence#

The delays are cumulative because each one counts from the moment the contact reaches that step. Two, then four, then six days puts the last email twelve days after signup. Three emails is fine if you have less to say. More than five in two weeks is where unsubscribe rates start climbing.

Email 1: welcome and set expectations#

Send this immediately, with no delay in front of it.

The reason for sending immediately is not politeness. Someone who has this second entered their email address is watching their inbox for you. That is the highest attention you will ever have from this person, and it decays within minutes. An email that arrives the next morning arrives to someone who has forgotten signing up, which makes a spam complaint more likely.

There is a deliverability reason too. This first email tends to get opened, and early engagement from a new address is a good signal for your sending reputation.

What to include:

• What they signed up for, in the first line, in their words rather than yours.
• What they will receive from here on, and roughly how often. "One email a week, on Tuesdays" is worth more than a paragraph about your values.
• One thing to do next, and only one. Reply to this email, read one specific article, or set a preference.
• Your real name and a reply address that a person reads.

What to leave out: a full product tour, a discount code, more than one link, and any sentence about how excited you are.

Email 2: deliver the useful thing#

Delay: 2 days.

If people signed up for a guide, a checklist, a template or a discount, this is where it lands. If the thing was already delivered by the signup form itself, this email is the reminder that it exists, plus a short note on how to use it.

If your signup offered nothing specific, make this the most useful standalone email you can write on your subject. One idea, done properly, that would still be worth reading if it arrived from a stranger. This email is where a subscriber decides whether opening your emails is worth the effort.

Keep the format plain. Text, one link, no navigation bar.

Email 3: show what the product does#

Delay: 4 days after email 2, arriving on day 6.

Now you can talk about what you sell. Do it by showing one problem being solved rather than listing features. Pick the single problem your product handles best, describe the situation the reader is probably in, and show the shortest path from that situation to a resolution.

Include one link, to the specific thing you described. Not the homepage.

If a field on the contact records their industry, their role, or which lead magnet brought them in, this is the email where a condition earns its keep. Two versions, one per audience, is worth the extra work. See Personalization tags for the mechanics and Segments for the audience definitions.

Email 4: a soft ask#

Delay: 6 days after email 3, arriving on day 12.

Twelve days in, someone who has opened three emails knows who you are. Ask for one thing.

Soft means the ask is small and the exit is easy. A trial, a demo, a call, a first purchase with a low commitment, or a reply if they want help deciding. Say what happens after they act, so the ask does not feel like a trapdoor.

Include the counter-offer plainly: if now is not the right time, they stay on the list and keep getting the weekly email. Saying that out loud reduces unsubscribes on this email more than any subject line change will.

After email 4, the automation ends and the contact continues receiving your regular campaigns.

Branching on engagement#

If you want one condition in the sequence, put it before email 4 and read whether the contact clicked anything in emails 2 or 3.

Contacts who clicked go to email 4 as written. Contacts who clicked nothing get a version with a lower ask, for example a reply-with-a-question rather than a booking link. Keep both paths ending at the same place so the automation stays readable.

Do not branch on opens alone. Open tracking depends on the recipient's mail client loading a tracking image, and plenty of clients block or prefetch that, so a missing open does not reliably mean a person is not reading.

Common problems#

People receive the welcome series twice. Someone signed up on two forms that both add to the same list, or they were removed and re-added. Set a field on the contact when they finish the sequence, and add a condition at the top of the automation that stops anyone who already has it.

The first email arrives hours late. Confirm there is no delay step before it, and confirm the trigger fires on the contact being added rather than on something that resolves later.

Everyone on the list got welcomed at once. The automation was activated against a list that already had members. Read the section on existing contacts in Build a workflow before you activate anything on a populated list.

Unsubscribes concentrate on email 3. The jump from useful to promotional is too abrupt. Make email 3 more specific about the problem and less about the product.