This roundup of onboarding email examples includes specific lessons learned and collated by these companies, and it includes links to their full email onboarding templates.
What Is an Onboarding Email?
An onboarding email is the first point of contact sent from a business to its customers after they purchase or sign up for a product or service.
The goal of an onboarding email is to welcome and engage with your customer, provide information about your business, product, or service, and nurture the new relationship.
Onboarding Email Sequence
An onboarding email sequence is a series of emails sent to new customers to provide them with information about the product or service they have purchased. The goal is to help them build confidence in their purchase decision and to nurture a positive relationship with them.
Onboarding email sequences may also recommend other services, products, or add-ons and can include surveys to get to know the customer and their loyalty to your brand.
23 Onboarding Email Examples
With that in mind, below are 23 of the best examples ranging from Fintech to SaaS onboarding emails.
1. All of Upscope’s onboarding emails: sign up, trial, install, purchase
Upscope is next generation screen sharing that makes support, onboarding and sales enjoyably simple. The Upscope onboarding sequence covers sign-up, trial and purchase.
See all of the onboarding email sequence examples for Upscope Co-browsing here.
2. Groove’s “You are in” email was game-changing
Groove outlines their main emails and mentions that the insights they gained from their "You are in PLUS one question" email have been game-changing for them.
See Grove’s automated onboarding emails here.
3. Close makes every email actionable
Close grew from a sales company into a sales software company (which can send drip emails) and you’ll notice that their emails are surprisingly different.
They aim to make their customers more successful through every interaction so every email they send is actionable. They also promote their free products just as strongly as their paid ones.
See Close’s actionable email drip campaign here.
4. Customer.io writes emails that pave the way toward action
“If you’re not familiar with something, confusing jargon, vague generalities, and abstract ideas end up becoming reasons to lose interest…
In email, of course, those are immediate reasons to unsubscribe, delete, ignore, or even spam.”
Learn how to write emails that pave the way toward action with Customer.io here.
5. Square’s email specialist and his multiple nudges
“People are busy (especially business owners) and sometimes need multiple nudges. Currently, we send reminders one, three, and seven days after signup.”
Learn a lesson from Square’s email specialist here.
6. Persuasive SaaS onboarding emails: 10 conversion lessons stolen from attorneys
Build the first ten days of your onboarding campaign so your user achieves the aha moment.
Intercom discovered that the first ten days after your new user signs up for your software are critical.
In this period, your new user is pumped to take action and use your app. This also covers how to figure out what that aha moment is.
Read Persuasive SaaS’s 10 conversion lessons here.
7. An email onboarding flow example used to get 40%+ open rates
This is a comprehensive list of 13 emails with commentary against each one.
See Encharge’s email onboarding sequence here.
8. Copyhackers did these 7 things to a SaaS onboarding email sequence, and it tripled paid conversions
This one is very fascinating as they not only increased Wistia’s conversions by 350% but they did it by breaking the normally quoted rules on both selling methods and length of emails.
“As we work to grow Airstory, we see — time and again — that the biz gets stronger when our copy acts like our online salesperson… and results get crappy when our copy doesn’t realize it’s supposed to be selling”
Read Copyhacker’s 7 email onboarding tips here.
9. Here are all of the emails they send at Drift
Drift listed all their onboarding emails and others are stealing them.
See all of Drift’s onboarding emails here.
10. Mailjet shows us how to deliver the best customer onboarding emails
“All of these tips highlight one key point: the secret of successful onboarding emails that customers are glad to get, is simple. A great onboarding process consists of delivering value and education, to help your clients advance into the deeper stages of your service.”
Learn how to deliver the best customer onboarding emails here.
11. Eleven welcome email template examples that grow sales from day 1
“The welcome email is the most important email brands can send to new subscribers. Yes, even more important than all the broadcast, targeted and triggered messages combined.”
Get Big Commerce’s email template examples here.
Also, see CleverTap's key advice and examples of welcome emails that work here.
12. The killer strategy behind Prodpad’s new user onboarding emails
“Here at ProdPad, our emails are doing something right. People really like our automated user onboarding emails. They respond to them. They make strangers want to reach out to us. They’ve helped us double our conversion rate. These emails are on a mission.”
What’s interesting is that Prodpad also broke down its user personas into 3 sections. They drew up three onboarding personas rooted in their behaviour during the ten minutes after signup:
Silent Shaun, Average Joe and Super Sally and then figured out a different path to convert the Silent Shaun and the Average Joe into a Super Sally.
See Propod’s strategy here.
13. How Sleeknote increased engagement for its onboarding emails by 1213.3%
“That’s a 52.41% increase in open rates and a 1213.3% increase in click-throughs. Today, I’ll reveal the exact strategy we used, including the exact emails we’re sending, and how you can do the same.”
Borrow Sleeknote’s welcome email templates here.
14. Bulletproof user onboarding
“The lesson, in short, was…When you address UNCERTAINTY with FLEXIBILITY, you generate RESILIENCE. And this, dear friends, is a quality I often find sorely lacking in many on-boarding experiences.”
View Bulletproof’s user onboarding here.
15. Everything you should know about customer onboarding emails
“You might offer an app that can do 100 different tasks, but the tasks you should introduce your customers to are those required to get started, or basic steps that help the user get familiar with your product. Ask yourself, what does a new customer need to know to get started? Focus your email efforts on those features.”
Read the full article by Pinpointe here.
16. 14 onboarding email examples that build trust with subscribers
“With these examples of welcome emails, you’ll be able to tweak your own welcome and onboarding strategies to give new email list subscribers a better experience.
You’ll also learn some useful welcome email best practices to guide your own welcome email strategy.” — Sharon Hurley Hall
Read the full article by Optin Monster here.
17. 10 user onboarding best practices for retaining your new and existing customers
“You wouldn’t keep filling up a bucket full of holes without stopping to plug them, you shouldn’t keep growing your userbase if all your users have only ever logged in once.” — Craig Morrison
View the 10 best practices here.
18. Don’t go overboard with your onboarding
“There is a balance to be found between too much and too little. The problem of choice is not necessarily in number as it is in the manner and form in which the information is presented.”
Read the full article here.
19. Designing a great onboarding experience
“The decision of signing up or making a purchase is a difficult decision even on the simplest apps. Trust is the most expensive gift users could give to you, so make sure to convince them you deserve it.” — Anthony Miller
Learn how to design a great onboarding experience here.
20. The art of customer onboarding using email nurturing
“A customer is truly acquired when he/she actually uses the product and achieves their first success. And that’s the goal of customer onboarding.”
Read Zeta AI’s blog on the art of customer onboarding here.
21. 7 Apps that excel at user onboarding — and what we can learn from them
“You don’t have to guess at the effectiveness of your user onboarding experience when you can get feedback from actual users on a realistic, but easy-to-tweak prototype.”
Find the 7 best apps for user onboarding here.
22. Your 7-step essential user onboarding checklist
“User onboarding sets the tone of your relationship with your new customer, and sets their expectations of the quality, value and usefulness of your service.”
View the 7-step checklist here.
Make Onboarding a Focus with Upscope
In addition to sending well-thought-out email onboarding sequences, there are other ways to transform your customer onboarding processes. Upscope offers easy-to-use instant screen sharing that makes it easy to walk customers through your products or services.
Get started with Upscope today and watch your customer loyalty grow.
