What a welcome message is
A welcome message is a message that is sent to a person when they start following your account. It is an efficient format if you can use it right. It is vital to avoid being obsessive or annoying. If you follow special rules, your messages will look very natural and help you to achieve some specific marketing goals.
What are welcome messages for?
- They help build a closer relationship with the follower: a person follows you, then you send them a message and encourage starting a conversation. That is how the interaction between you and your client starts;
- Quite often, you ask your follower a question. If the user answers your question, it is a signal for Instagram that this person is interested in your account, and they are interacting with you. So it is a sign of the highest engagement;
- Welcome messages are also a nice way to give some information about yourself. You never know how followers found your page and why they started following you: maybe they liked your photos but didn’t understand what your core activity is. Through welcome messages you can represent your activity and describe what useful content users can find on your page;
- Welcome messages allow generating leads.
There are two formats for them:
- You can provide a link to the page with your catalog, coming events, etc.;
- You can ask a question, for example: “Hello, we offer traveling tours all over the world, please let us know if you have any questions on this topic.”, this is an example of lead generation.
How to create a welcome message
There are particular services to send welcome messages. You write a message, then choose the category of users to receive it, e.g., new followers, and after that, you start sending.
You can use a filter. For example, if a new follower does not have any posts or a profile picture – there is no point in starting following them because it is most likely useless.
Rules of a successful welcome message
Create a few types of messages
To make sure Instagram will not regard your welcome messages as spam or mass mailing, you should better create a few different types of messages.
For example: hi/hello/good morning; we appreciate/we are grateful for/thanks for/thank you for, etc. In this case, the service will choose one of these options each time. In this case, Instagram will regard the messages as different posts.
Use filters
Add filters to prevent the service from sending messages to bots and promoting accounts, and also from arousing suspects by very high activity.
Work out the sending scheme
Your welcome message should not be too long. The following three-four parts are enough:
- Greetings;
- Giving thanks for following your page;
- Description of your activity;
- Call to action.
There are two main call-to-action formats:
- You provide an external link to your coming events, courses, training sessions, etc.;
- You ask a question, and this format is even better because this way, you start a conversation with your followers. If they respond to you, then the Instagram smart feed will show your posts more often.
Generally speaking, you can also mix both formats — add a link and also ask a question.
Onlypult posts to all social media platforms, collects analytics data, allows creating micro landing pages and multiple links, and helps monitor what people say about your company.
