Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Welcome Message Gallery

In a quick (unscientific) review of clients I’ve worked with, the average welcome series generated 6 times the revenue per email sent when compared to the rest of their email program. The worst performing welcome message had over twice the revenue per email sent compared to the total program.

This post is a companion post to my ClickZ article on Welcome Messages.

I’ve collected a sample of 30 different companies. The top 20 Internet Retailers plus another 10 top internet apparel retailers. For each I collected:
- Email signup pages
- Welcome messages
o Images on
o Images off
o iPhone message
o iphone inbox

You can view the full gallery here.

You can view the different categories by clicking on the tags on the left of your screen. The most general tags are
- Email-Signup. Home page plus other email signup pages.
- Welcome-Email. Welcome email as displayed in gmail.
- Welcome-Email-iPhone. Welcome email as displayed on iPhone.
- Welcome-Inbox-iPhone. Welcome email preview as displayed in iPhone preview within inbox.

You can also search for company name or any other text you’d like to find. The text in the image screen shots are searchable.

A few observations beyond my ClickZ article:

American Eagle & J.C. Penney still use plain text messages.

Abercrombie and J. Crew still use the “One Big Image” version of an email.


Click the “800 Number” tag to see the few who use phone numbers in their emails. This works great for mobile.

-Zappos and L.L. Bean have clickable links to phone numbers.
-Circuit City, HP, and Office Max have 800 numbers but as images, so they do nothing to help out the most obvious need for an 800 number – the mobile customer.


Nordstrom and Wal-Mart have trouble using text nav bar in the mobile client.