Field Note: Email Welcome Sequence Not Sending Properly
A welcome sequence that fires at random, lands in spam, or opens with a bracket where your name should be, is doing something other than welcoming anyone.
A welcome sequence that fires at random, lands in spam, or opens with a bracket where your name should be, is doing something other than welcoming anyone.
Sitting there, doing damage nobody's clocked yet Your welcome sequence works away in the background while you're busy with clients who are actually in the room. It can be fixed properly, and it takes less time than you'd think to check.
Your welcome sequence probably fires the moment a client joins.
Half nine on a Tuesday. Three in the morning. Whenever they happened to be scrolling rather than sleeping.
A new client checks their phone and finds you've been up all night, apparently, waiting for them specifically.
Timing like that tells a new client you weren't expecting them. Not the impression you're after, on a first date with someone's nervous system.
Wellness marketing guides: practical guidance on this topic:
Resonant issues: challenges nearby to this:
You'd never turn up to a first session an hour early and pace outside the building. Your emails do it for you, at three in the morning, without asking permission.
We looked at a practice whose welcome email had been going straight to spam for four months.
Undetected, the way a birthday card might land at the wrong house every year, with nobody at either address thinking to mention it.
Nobody flagged it because nobody knew to check.
Why would you? You sent it. That felt like the job done.
Four months of new clients starting a working relationship with silence, and calling it going cold.
Here's a peculiar fact about fixing deliverability.
It often means sending fewer emails in that first week.
Cramming five emails into three days reads to an inbox as urgency. Urgency reads as spam, filed away with the boiler-cover renewals and the raffle tickets.
A gentler pace lands better than a full inbox does. Your welcome sequence isn't an advent calendar. Nobody wants a door opening every day.
One good email a week beats five frantic ones on day one. Give a new client room to actually read what you've sent them.
Try this on your own site. Sign up as a stranger would, with an email address you never use for anything else.
Then wait. Watch what lands, if anything does at all.
Fifteen minutes of pretending to be a stranger tells you more than any report will.
You'll learn more from this than from a month of guessing. It's the closest you'll get to watching yourself through a client's eyes.
71.8% of UK therapists earn £30,000 or less a year.
Many follow growth advice written for people selling trainers, not for people holding a room steady for a client in distress.
A broken welcome sequence sits inside that figure, doing its small, unglamorous damage. Not dramatic. Just steady, like a dripping tap you've stopped hearing.
A working welcome sequence is part of the fix, not the whole of it, but it's the part sitting right there under your nose.
Front of mind: some of our thinking on this topic:
Fixing it costs an evening, not a fortune. Cheaper than the tap, in the end.
One clinic had a welcome sequence addressed to "Hi [First Name]" for two years. Brackets and all, like a form letter nobody proof-read since the printer was new.
Nobody had opened their own inbox to see what a new client saw. Everyone was too busy running sessions in the room to check the thing running itself.
Two years of clients being greeted by a bracket, and booking anyway, because the work itself was good enough to survive it.
Checking your own welcome email is the least glamorous ten minutes in your week, and one of the most useful.
Some practices keep this working themselves. Checking spam placement and sender scores the way you'd check a boiler pressure gauge, on a schedule, without drama.
Others hand it to a specialist who does that checking for a living, the way you'd hand the boiler itself to a person with the right certificate.
Both are proper ways to run a practice. Neither involves crossing your fingers and hoping the pilot light stays lit.
Pick whichever keeps you out of the loft with a torch. Either way, someone should be checking the gauge.
The odd bit is that a welcome sequence isn't really about welcoming anyone. It reads like hospitality. It works like evidence.
It's the first proof a stranger gets that booking with you was a sound decision, well before a single session confirms it one way or the other.
Your welcome sequence is doing the work of a first impression, at four in the morning, without you in the room. Worth knowing what it's saying on your behalf.
A good sequence makes the case for you while you sleep. You wake up already vouched for.
Get your welcome sequence checked, timed properly, and finally rid of its brackets. Fix your welcome sequence
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