Prompt · Welcome
Day-one welcome for a new free trial
Get them to complete the one action that makes the product make sense.
- Email type
- Welcome
- Business
- SaaS
- Tone
- Friendly
- Length
- 100-140 words
The welcome email prompt
Write a plain-text day-one welcome email from [SENDER] to someone who just started a free trial of [PRODUCT]. Words only — no HTML, no layout notes. The single action this email drives: [THE FIRST ACTION]. Rules: - 100 to 140 words. Short sentences. - Do not tour the product. Name one action and explain what it proves: [WHAT IT PROVES]. A list of five features is a list of five ways to do nothing. - Say what the trial is in concrete terms: [TRIAL LENGTH], including whether a card is required and what happens on the last day. Vagueness here is what makes people cancel early out of caution. - One ask, written as an ordinary sentence with the link inside it. No second link, no help-centre tour, no calendar booking. - Invite a reply and mean it. One line, at the end, from a person. - Do not congratulate them for signing up. They did not achieve anything yet. - Never invent a number, statistic, customer count or time saving. Where a figure belongs and I have not supplied it, leave [XX]. - No exclamation marks. No emoji. Sentence case. Write a subject line under 45 characters naming the first action. Return subject, preheader, body, sign-off.
What to fill in first
[PRODUCT]- What you build, in the words a customer would use.
[THE FIRST ACTION]- The one thing that makes the product click. Not "explore the dashboard" — the specific act.
[WHAT IT PROVES]- What they will understand once they have done it. This is why the action is worth doing.
[TRIAL LENGTH]- How long they have, and what happens at the end. Say whether a card is required.
[SENDER]- A person's name and role. Product welcome emails signed by a company get filed as product welcome emails.
[XX]- Leave as written. The placeholder for a figure you supply, never one the model supplies.
When to send it
Within minutes of signup, before they close the tab. This email competes with the product itself, so it should be shorter than the onboarding screen they just left. If your trial has a setup step that blocks everything else, this email exists to get that step done and nothing more.
What to change first
[THE FIRST ACTION] and [WHAT IT PROVES]. Most trial welcomes name a feature; the ones that
activate name a moment. “Import your first list” is a feature. “Import your first list and you will
see the segments you have been guessing at” is a reason. If you cannot say what the action proves,
you have picked the wrong action.
What good output looks like
Subject: Start with one import
Preheader: It takes about two minutes and the rest makes sense afterwards.
Welcome to [PRODUCT]. The fastest way to see whether this is useful is to import one list.
It takes about two minutes, and once it is in you will see the segments you have been guessing at for the last year. Everything else in here is built on that.
Import a list and have a look.
Your trial runs [TRIAL LENGTH] and we did not ask for a card, so nothing happens at the end unless you decide it should.
If you get stuck, reply to this. It comes to me.
— [SENDER]
The prompt writes the words. Bring them here and the studio builds the campaign — branded, dark-mode safe, and ready to import.
Generate your ownIn the studio
A model writes copy. It does not write email.
Production HTML that survives Outlook, dark mode and a Gmail clip is a different job from writing the words. Describe the send once and export it to Mailchimp, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign or MailerLite.