The power of welcome emails cannot be underestimated. They provide a prime arena in which to strike when it comes to convincing prospects to establish a relationship with you and buy from you.

But if recent studies are to be believed, more than a few of you will need some convincing about the ability of welcome emails to be a sales-nabber.

For those who need it, here’s a basic overview of how welcome emails can result in order confirmations…

Open rates

Ramesh Lakshmi-Ratan, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Direct Marketing Association, states that:

Welcome emails have significantly higher open rates than regular emails.

Yet, we see two extraordinary things all the time-

1) businesses that send out generic forms that do nothing but contain a subscription confirmation or

2) businesses that don’t send any welcome emails at all.

If prospects are more likely to read welcome emails over regular ones, businesses who don’t send out welcome emails lose out on crucial marketing opportunities. Those are sales circling the drain!

Connections

Welcome emails can set the tone of your relationship with prospects. They can also help build emotional connections that lead to long-standing relationships. Engaging prospects in welcome emails for these ends should seem like a no-brainer, especially since prospects make the first move by expressing interest in your business. Your goal should be to make welcome emails valuable by establishing immediate connections and leaving prospects wanting more. The desire could result in revisiting your website, or as savvy business owners know, clicking on links that lead to valued products or services.

Brand reinforcement

Are you comfortable with knowing that 40% of online shoppers’ perceptions of an online business depends on the information they see about the business elsewhere on the Internet? That means that anyone, anywhere can say something negative about your business and it’ll factor majorly into prospects’ decisions to do business with you. You no doubt know the importance of a first impression. Kara Trivunovic, a former email marketing strategist with Premiere Global Services, knows it, too. She says:

It is said that you never get a second chance to make a first impression—and that adage holds true to the email channel as well.

You can counteract any negativity and reinforce your brand by being proactive, having the first say and speaking for yourself in your welcome emails.

Calls-to-Action

From browsing products or clicking-to-buy (and much more), calls-to-action can abound in your welcome emails. High open rates and the general practice of dressing 1/3 of a welcome email in calls-to-action can mean serious sales for your business. Calls-to-action can also be where you lay the groundwork for promises and offers and set your prospects’ expectations.

Presence

Sending out welcome emails primes your prospects for following correspondence. If you fail to send out welcome emails and remind prospects of their interest in your business, the probability that your correspondence will be later marked as spam skyrockets. After that, unsubscribing happens and all of your list-building hard work flattens. When businesses truly optimize a welcome email, they create reasons why prospects look forward to more correspondence and open many doors to purchasing while doing it.

If you’re still not convinced, you’re not alone.

In 2006 the “Retail Welcome Email Subscription Benchmark Study” found that only 66% of prominent retailers online sent welcome emails. The following year, that figure jumped to 72%. However, a recent study by Return Path found that 60% of brands are back to old habits and are shunning welcome emails. These aren’t run-of-the-mill businesses, either- you can count BMW, Nike and Hertz as some companies who’ve fallen to the wayside.

Obviously, this downturn couldn’t come at a worse economic time, but it does make one wonder how many sales are being lost to bad email marketing practices as opposed to the financial crisis. It’s clear that companies recognize the importance of email correspondence, as 77% of companies studied by Return Path positioned email registration so that it could be easily found on front pages.

It’s simply the implementation that’s off.

And that’s why there’s a Part II to this blog.

Tune in tomorrow when I detail seven ways to improve your welcome emails.