Subscription welcome email: what to send in the first 30 days

Quick note on words. "Subscriber" in this post means someone who bought a product subscription (subscribe and save), not someone who joined your email list. This is for Shopify founders selling consumables on subscription through Recharge or a similar app, with Klaviyo sending the emails.

Why does a subscription customer need a different welcome?

Your list welcome series is built for someone who handed over an email and hasn't bought yet, and the offer in email #1 is the main event. I break that flow down in why welcome email #1 does almost all the work.

A new subscription customer is somewhere else entirely. They've bought, and they've agreed to be charged again. They don't need a pitch. They need to feel cared for and guided, and to have a great first experience with the product.

The window that matters is the first cycle. On a monthly plan, that's roughly 30 days between the first order and the second charge. Your job in those 30 days is to keep people engaged with the program they just started.

Should the confirmation email come from Klaviyo?

I don't send subscription confirmation emails from Klaviyo. Those come from the subscription software, and I keep them there.

Recharge's Klaviyo guide does describe moving them over: it says to contact Klaviyo support to set those emails as transactional and to turn off the matching Recharge notifications so nobody gets two copies. You can do that. I don't think it's necessary to have everything in Klaviyo. Keeping them separate is simpler, and it keeps the Klaviyo series focused on its real job.

That job is helpful content: making sure the subscriber is set up properly and getting value from the product.

What does Recharge send to Klaviyo?

You build this flow off your subscription app's events, so check what you actually have before you build. Klaviyo doesn't document these events itself, so I go by Recharge's help center. These are the ones that matter in the first 30 days:

• Subscription started on ReCharge. Recharge suggests this as the trigger for welcoming someone to their subscription.
• Order placed successfully on Recharge. Recharge suggests using this with a "CHECKOUT" filter when someone buys more than one subscription at checkout, so they get one welcome instead of several.
• Order upcoming on ReCharge. Sent three days before the queued charge by default. You can change that in Recharge's upcoming order email settings.
• Subscription paused, SKU swapped, frequency changed and next charge date changed. Each one is its own metric, so you can confirm changes the moment they happen.
• Subscription cancelled on ReCharge. This is where your churn emails take over.

Recharge also ships a pre-built "New Subscriber Welcome" flow for Klaviyo, described as welcoming new subscribers, reminding them of their subscription benefits and showing them how to manage it. It's a fair starting point. I'd rewrite the content so it sounds like your brand.

On a different subscription app? Check its docs for which events reach Klaviyo first.

What goes in a subscription welcome series?

Here's what I want a new subscriber to get across the first 30 days, after the subscription app's confirmation goes out:

• How to use it. Serving size, when to use it, what to expect in the first week. If the product never becomes a habit, the boxes start piling up, so make the habit easy.
• How to get the most out of it. The guidance that makes someone feel looked after, not sold to.
• Your subscription, your rules. Skip, swap, change frequency and pause, each with its own button.
• A check-in. Running low, or piling up? Link straight to changing the frequency.
• Your order is coming up. A heads-up before the second charge. More on this below.

Move the timing around to fit your shipping time and frequency. If you ship every two weeks, compress it.

I run the subscription welcome as its own automation, separate from the post-purchase series. A new subscriber needs the subscription details and the skip, swap and pause options, not emails built for a one-off order.

Why show skip, swap and pause early?

People cancel when the subscription stops fitting their life and they can't see another option. If the first time they look for one is the night before a charge, cancel is usually the button they find.

So show them the options while they're still happy. Make it read like control, not a retention trick: "Too much? Push it back. Want a different flavor next time? Swap it." A skipped month is a lot better than a cancelled subscription.

When someone does make a change, use the matching Recharge event to send a short confirmation with the new details and the next charge date. Nobody likes guessing what they'll be charged.

Does a subscription welcome series actually work?

Yes. For a health and wellness supplement brand, we built a welcome series for new subscribers, and it more than tripled the repeat rate. It was very effective at keeping people engaged with the program they'd just started.

That's the point of the whole series. A subscriber who uses the product, knows how to adjust the plan and hears from you in a helpful way is a lot more likely to still be around for order two, three and four.

The "your order is coming up" email before charge two

This is the money email. For a subscription wellness brand, the "your order is coming up" reminder made $47,321 in one month, 74% of all flow revenue.

The first reminder is special because it's the first charge the customer doesn't click "buy" on. Recap what's coming, when it ships and what it costs. Put skip and swap right there in the email.

If the welcome emails did their job, this one reads like a heads-up, not a surprise. I cover the full reminder build, the cancellation flow and subscriber winback in subscription churn emails, so I won't repeat it here.

What should a subscription founder fix first?

Most subscription brands I look at have the same three gaps:

1. Thin flows. A confirmation and a reminder, and nothing in between.
2. Subscribers aren't segmented properly. Subscribers and one-time buyers get treated the same.
3. No campaign series for subscribers. Without one, subscribers can go long stretches without hearing anything from the brand except charge and shipping notices.

Fix the segmentation first, because the other two depend on it. Once you can send to subscribers as their own group, build the welcome series and give them campaigns of their own. For the wider picture on keeping customers coming back, see my repeat purchase email strategy.

How do you know the welcome series is working?

Judge it by clicks, not opens. Apple and Google inflate open rates, so opens tell you a little about subject lines and not much else.

Here's what I'd watch each month:

• Repeat rate for new subscribers, before and after the series went live.
• Skips, swaps and frequency changes versus cancellations in the first 30 days. More changes and fewer cancels is the trend you want.
• Clicks on the manage-subscription links. Clicks with nothing happening after usually means a link is broken, so click every one before the flow goes live.

For supplement brands specifically, I go deeper on reorder timing and subscription offers in supplement email marketing.

FAQ

WRITTEN BY Jack White

Founder of Bardown Digital, a Chicago-based Klaviyo email and retention agency for Shopify brands. He's worked with brands doing $500K to $100M a year, with $100M+ in email-attributed revenue across them.

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