How and When to Send Onboarding Emails + Real-World Examples

As a ubiquitous communication channel, email allows businesses to reach customers directly in their inboxes rather than relying on social media algorithms or paid advertising platforms to deliver their messages. Email marketing helps businesses build customer relationships, guide purchasing decisions, and stay connected across the entire customer life cycle.

With that in mind, onboarding emails are a natural place to start when building a strong email marketing program. Learn what onboarding emails are, when to send them, and best practices to follow—illustrated by real-world examples. 

What are onboarding emails?

Onboarding emails are messages businesses send to new, existing, and potential customers after someone signs up to receive emails, or after they’ve made a purchase. Onboarding emails introduce the brand, product, or service and guide early interactions. They’re designed to support a positive customer journey by setting expectations, providing helpful information, and encouraging next steps—improve customer retention and loyalty over time. 

Onboarding emails aren’t limited to the very beginning of a customer relationship. While they often start with an initial welcome or post-sign-up message, onboarding emails usually continue after a purchase, helping customers learn how to use the product or service more effectively, or when new features are added. 

In the software-as-a-service (SaaS) world, companies commonly use onboarding email sequences to move new users from sign-up through activation and long-term engagement. Ecommerce brands apply a similar approach by welcoming new subscribers or purchasers, guiding them through fulfillment, and helping them get the most value from their purchases. 

Unlike traditional marketing emails, which can be one-off promotional messages, onboarding emails are designed as a sequence, guiding customers from sign-up to purchase to delivery to long-term usage and engagement. 

When to send onboarding emails

• Welcoming new customers
• Following up on abandoned carts or browsing
• Sharing next steps after a purchase
• Showing customers how to use a product
• Asking for customer feedback

Businesses can send onboarding emails at key moments throughout the customer journey. Below are common scenarios where sending an onboarding email can help guide customers and encourage engagement:

Welcoming new customers

The welcome email is one of the most commonly recognizable types of onboarding email and is often where a business makes its first impression on a customer. Typically sent once, after someone subscribes or makes an initial purchase, welcome emails help set the tone for the relationship. 

If sent to a customer after making a recent purchase, a welcome message is an opportunity to tell the recipient how much your brand appreciates their purchase and outline what happens next, such as order processing, shipping timelines, or how to track their delivery. If sent to a new subscriber who hasn’t yet bought anything, it can highlight the value of your brand and incentivize a first purchase, often by offering a discount code. In both cases, welcome emails should express your gratitude for a customer’s interest and support and help establish a foundation upon which you can build your relationship.

Following up on abandoned carts or browsing

If a customer has placed an item in their cart but hasn’t followed through with a purchase, sending a reminder email can encourage conversion. Similarly, if someone hasn’t added an item to their cart but has frequently browsed a product on your website, sending them an email can serve as a nudge of encouragement and provide a convenient path toward completing their purchase. 

For these types of emails, discounts or free shipping codes can be effective ways to gain a customer’s business. (Shopify store owners can automatically apply discounts to abandoned cart emails.) Alternatively, you can send an email centered around the product they’ve shown interest in, highlighting the key features, benefits, and social proof to persuade them without offering a discount. In either case, sending an email at this point in the customer journey can help prevent loss of interest and guide customers back to their initial intent. 

Benchmarks from email provider Klaviyo show that abandoned cart flows outperform other automated email flows, delivering the highest average revenue per recipient ($3.65) and the strongest placed order rate (3.33%).

Sharing next steps after a purchase

Once a customer has placed an order, you can send an onboarding email focused on fulfillment and access to help ensure a positive experience with your product. For physical products, this email can include shipping details with links to tracking numbers, as well as guidance on how to manage their account if you offer a subscription service. 

For digital products or downloadable content, next steps might include instructions for accessing files, logging in to a customer portal, activating a subscription, or getting started with the purchased content right away. In all cases, this email should include any information that helps create a smoother transition from purchase to product use.

Showing customers how to use a product

Another post-purchase onboarding email that can improve customer experience is a “how-to” email to educate users on using your product. This type of email should clearly outline the steps for users to set up their product, put it to use, and get the most value from it. 

For example, if you sell espresso machines, how-to emails might include instructions for setup, guidance on pulling espresso shots, grind and water ratio recommendations, and best maintenance practices. If you sell cashmere sweaters, this email might include cleaning and storage instructions to prevent damage and maximize longevity. Including helpful tips like these in your onboarding email campaign can make customers feel more confident using your product and lead to a more positive overall experience.

Asking for customer feedback

Lastly, onboarding emails can be an effective way to collect direct feedback from customers. If you’re trying to improve a product, you can reach out to customers who have purchased it to gather their thoughts and experiences. 

These emails often include a link to a survey, with an incentive such as a discount or offer code to encourage completion. The responses can provide valuable insight into what’s working well and what may need improvement. If you follow through and use customer feedback to make changes to your product, you can share such updates in your onboarding emails too, which can make them feel valued and heard. 

Examples of onboarding emails

• Who Gives a Crap
• Canyon Coffee
• Brick
• Buffy

To help you develop a successful user onboarding campaign, it’s useful to see how other businesses approach onboarding emails. Below are some of the best onboarding email examples from Shopify retailers:

Who Gives a Crap

This confirmation email from toilet paper subscription service Who Gives a Crap is a strong onboarding example. Sent after a customer places their first order, the email welcomes them and expresses gratitude for their purchase. Using its brand colors and fonts, Who Gives a Crap highlights the personal, ecological, and humanitarian impact of the purchase. 

The email also includes a direct link to the customer’s account dashboard for managing order details or personal information and closes by encouraging customers to reach out with questions—helping create a warm, hospitable start to the customer experience.

Canyon Coffee

In this welcome email from Canyon Coffee, the brand thanks subscribers for signing up for its email list and details the benefits of doing so. The layout uses photography to establish the tone of Canyon’s marketing, customer reviews to provide social proof, and product screenshots with helpful links to encourage users to check out the brand’s offerings. 

At the top, a “Welcome to the Canyon Social Club” banner helps position the email as one geared toward building a community rather than a purely promotional message. It closes with an invitation for customer inquiries. The email is visually engaging and concise, and promotes what Canyon has to offer without being overly aggressive or sales-driven. 

Brick

This onboarding email from Brick, maker of a productivity device and accompanying app, provides instructions for setting up and using the company’s signature product. It’s especially important to Brick, as a single-product business, that customers understand how to use its unique offering. 

The email includes a step-by-step breakdown of the unboxing, installation, and activation processes, helping customers feel prepared when their order arrives. Including a how-to email like this in your onboarding email sequence can reduce user error and help foster a supportive relationship between your business and its customers.

Buffy

This post-purchase onboarding email from bedding retailer Buffy shows customers items that might complement their previous purchase while also promoting its holiday sale. To send an email like this, Buffy uses customer data to re-engage shoppers who have already supported the brand. The email begins, “You already love your Buffy bedding,” reminding the customer of the relationship they’ve already built. 

Because the original purchase in this example was Buffy’s Breeze comforter, the email suggests two duvet covers, along with pillows and a sheet set, to create a complete bedding arrangement. A 20% discount further incentivizes the recipient to click through.

Best practices for creating a strong onboarding process

• Build an onboarding email sequence
• Use templates
• Segment your audience
• Have a clear objective 
• Reward users for opening your emails

Good onboarding emails are intentional. Each message should have a clear objective, guiding customers toward a specific action while using direct, concise language and consistent visual elements, such as brand colors and layout. 

When delivered as part of an automated onboarding flow—such as welcome or post-purchase sequences—these emails tend to outperform one-off campaigns in both engagement and revenue. According to Klaviyo, email flows generate three-times-higher click rates and 18-times-higher average revenue per recipient, showing the value of a structured onboarding approach. 

Here are some tactics and tools you can use to send effective onboarding messages: 

Build an onboarding email sequence

Establish an onboarding email sequence to better serve customers at each point in their buying experience.

Begin by welcoming customers to your brand and acknowledging their interest, either by thanking them for their purchase or by referencing a product they have browsed. From there, think in terms of timing: what customers need one day after purchase, several days later, and in the weeks that follow.

For example, you might send an immediate confirmation and next-step email, followed by shipping or access updates, then a how-to message once the product arrives, and finally a follow-up survey after customers have had time to use it. Structuring your onboarding emails this way helps ensure your customers feel supported through the first several weeks rather than spammed by loads of unnecessary information.

Use templates

Using templates helps maintain visual and structural consistency across an onboarding email campaign, reinforcing brand recognition as customers move through different stages of their journey.

Shopify Messaging offers a wide array of customizable onboarding email templates that make it easy to create messages aligned with your brand identity. The platform lets you customize templates with your brand colors, logos, and other media to ensure visual consistency across all customer touchpoints. 

Segment your audience

Segmentation is the practice of grouping customers based on shared characteristics or behaviors, so you can tailor onboarding emails to their specific needs. Common onboarding segments include new subscribers, first-time purchasers, one-time buyers, and high-value or repeat customers. 

Using segmentation helps ensure your onboarding emails reach your customers at the right moment, rather than being sent as broad, one-size-fits-all messages. Shopify Messaging allows you to use a range of data points—such as purchase history or usage patterns—to create these segments, so onboarding emails align with each customer’s current stage and feel more relevant and personalized. 

Once these segments are established, you can easily select them in the “To” field of your email. Grouping consumers this way makes it possible to tailor onboarding messages more precisely, using language and guidance that reflect customers’ actions and needs, and making each email feel timely and relevant rather than generic.

Have a clear objective

Each onboarding email should have a clear purpose for your business and one obvious takeaway for the customer. Defining what you want the email to accomplish—such as expressing gratitude, building brand affinity, or encouraging a next purchase—helps keep the message focused, while making the value clear to the reader ensures they know what to do next and why it matters.

Communicating this objective begins in your subject line and carries through to a clear call to action (CTA). For example, if you’re asking a customer for feedback, you can ask a question in the subject line like “How are we doing?” and have a CTA that links to a short feedback form. 

Reward users for opening your emails

Offering customers a benefit for engaging with your onboarding emails can encourage continued participation throughout the onboarding sequence. While discounts are a common incentive, rewards can also take other forms that support the onboarding experience rather than simply driving a sale.

For example, post-email sign-up onboarding emails might offer early access to product drops or share key launch information that isn’t otherwise advertised. These tactics help your onboarding chain feel less like a series of ads and more like a guide to help your customers have a better shopping experience.