Someone gave you their email address. For about a week afterwards they remember doing it, and they will open almost anything you send. After that you are a name in a list of names.
A welcome sequence is what you do with that week. Its job is not to sell. Its job is to turn a stranger who signed up for one reason into a person who knows what you do, has tried the smallest useful part of it, and has some idea who is on the other end.
Five emails is enough. Each one has a single purpose, and the moment two of them share a purpose you should cut one.
Email one: welcome, and what happens next
Send it immediately. Not within the hour, immediately, while the tab they signed up in is still open.
It does three things and stops. It thanks them in one line. It says what they will get from you and how often, in a sentence they could quote back. And it gives them the single most useful link, which is almost never your homepage.
Set the expectation honestly, because it is the promise everything else is measured against. If you send a short note most weeks, say that. Do not say “weekly insights” unless you intend to be weekly, and unless you have insights.
Email two: the one thing to try
Two days later. One action, small enough to finish before the coffee goes cold, and chosen because it is the thing that makes your product make sense.
Not a tour. Not a checklist of nine features. The single step that moves someone from having an account to having used the thing.
Write it as instructions, not as a pitch. A numbered set of three steps with a link at the top beats four paragraphs about value. The reader is deciding whether this will be effort, and the fastest way to answer that is to show them exactly how little effort it is.
Email three: where this came from
Four days after the second. Now you can spend some of the attention you have earned on something that is not useful, only true.
Why the thing exists. What you were doing before that made you build it. What you decided not to build, and why. Written by a named person, in the first person, signed.
This is the email people reply to, which matters for reasons covered further down. It is also the one that makes the difference between a company they use and a company they remember, and it costs you nothing but honesty.
Keep it short. A story told in four paragraphs is a story. In fourteen it is a brochure with feelings.
Email four: the common mistake
Three days later. Name the thing most people get wrong in the first fortnight, and explain the fix.
This works because it is useful whether or not they have started. If they have, it saves them. If they have not, it tells them what to avoid when they do, and it quietly demonstrates that you have watched enough people do this to know where they fall over.
One mistake. The temptation is to list five, and a list of five reads as content marketing, while one mistake with a fix reads as advice.
Email five: the invitation to reply
Four days after that, and shorter than everything before it.
Ask one question, and make it answerable in a sentence. “What were you hoping this would fix?” works better than “how are you finding it?”, because the first has an answer and the second has a shrug.
Send it from a mailbox a human reads. An invitation to reply that lands in a no-reply address is worse than no invitation, and people notice.
The replies to this email are the most valuable thing the whole sequence produces. They are unprompted sentences about what someone actually wanted, in their own words, which is the raw material for every landing page you will write next year.
Spacing, and knowing when to stop
The rhythm above runs about thirteen days: immediate, plus two, four, three and four. Close together at the start while you are still remembered, further apart as the sequence goes on.
More important than the spacing is knowing when to stop early.
Stop when someone replies. A person who has written you a sentence is in a conversation, and dropping a scheduled email into a conversation tells them the conversation was not real. Move them to a human and let the human decide what comes next.
Stop when someone buys, or upgrades, or does whatever the sequence was pointing at. Email four explaining the common mistake is fine. Email four arriving after they have already paid you, still talking as though they have not started, is the moment they learn you are not paying attention.
What the tooling has to do
In Markowill, a sequence is a list of steps, each with its position in the order and a delay in days that sets how long after the previous one it sends, and you enrol contacts from the CRM into it. Inbound replies are captured against the contact and classified, which is what lets a reply be treated as the signal to hand over rather than as another row in a report.
One thing to watch in any sequence tool, this one included: enrolling a contact who is already active in another sequence will have them receiving both at once. Check before you enrol in bulk.
Where to start
Write email five first. One question, three sentences, from a named mailbox, and send it by hand to the last ten people who signed up.
The replies will tell you what emails one to four should say, which is a better brief than anything you could write from an empty page this afternoon.
