Onboarding is often seen as an entry to a corporate labyrinth when ideally it should be looked at as footsteps to the excitement, motivation, and success. What makes it easier for your new hires is to break down information that you have to give to new hires into a more digestible chunk so that it is consumed right.

Importance of a New Employee Welcome Email Campaign

1. Establishes a good rapport and avoids post-offer drop-off surprises.

First off, your new hires are new to your system and it goes without saying that they would certainly be super excited to join the company. But wait? Does the excitement last until they join on their first day? Well, maybe. Maybe not. 

Now, the pre-joining time is the most vulnerable period and the reason is that they lose contact with you after receiving an offer from you. Sometimes they just don’t hear from you at all. Good talent is always in demand and will be contacted by multiple companies. In the worst-case, such things could signal their minds to try their luck with other companies. New Employee Welcome Emails is one of the best ways to keep your candidates engaged and posted so you don’t slip out of their minds during this vulnerable period rather you cultivate a good relationship with them.

2. Negates the frustrations due to late responses

All companies, especially HR folks have tons going on and it is practical that sometimes they take a light year to respond to any queries that their new hires might have during the welcome period. To keep them excited and motivated you can keep dripping out inspiring stories about the company and useful information for the new hire in a timely fashion. Break down every information that you have to give to new hires into a more digestible chunk so that it is consumed right. These constant communications from you would make them reconsider the frustrations caused due to late responses.

Pro Tip: Having the right tool with you also helps your HR folks to reply to that long lost email with timely reminders, etc., 

3. Gets your new hires to love you even before they join

Send amazing and mind-blowing content as part of your welcome email to your new hires. The sole purpose of sending New Employee Welcome Emails is to engage your new hires and not bore them with some boring stuff. So be mindful of what you send. Do your research work on what their interests could be and where it lies. When they get the sense that they are exactly where they should be with your company, you have yourself a loyal employee who loves you before Day 1. 

What goes into a new employee welcome email campaign: Day-wise break up

Setting up a new employee welcome email campaign is a breeze if you know what key information you want to drip out and how you are going to time it. You have sent the offer. The candidate has accepted it and the D-Day ie Joining Date is also informed. Is your job done? No. You send a series of emails before and after the D-Day to ensure the best onboarding experience. But, what are these emails, what should they have? Let's dive in and find answers to all that.

Let’s begin from 13 days before D-Day ie Day -13th to Day 60th after the employee is Onboarded. 

 

Email #1: Sent  on -13th Day: Thank you email for offer acceptance

The purpose of this mail is to thank your new hires for accepting your job offer. You might think. “Well, who even thanks candidates for accepting an offer?” But, it does add a lot of value to the whole onboarding process. It’s the baby step to helping them feel good about having chosen your company. 

You might as well make use of the same email to comb through some valuable feedback about the interview process so that you can go back to reiterate on that too. You can also the candidate/new hire to send their social media or professional profile handles which we will use in our next email. 

Email #2: Sent  on -12th Day: Meet your team

The manager is responsible for announcing the role, previous experience, interests, and hobbies, and other interesting facts about the new hire so that they can introduce them to their team effectively. But before that, draft an email tagging both the manager and the candidate so that they can catch-up with each other beforehand. Also, this email shall act as a trigger to remind the manager about introducing his new hire to the team. 

What you can address in this mail (for the managers)

• Add social links/profiles of the new hire with the manager which he can share with the team so that they can connect with each other on social circles even before day one. This helps both parties to set a context about what interesting topics they can discuss when they get to meet in person. 
• You can even ask your new hires to learn about their new friends during the pre-onboarding phase to make onboarding easier and better. 
• Use this mail to introduce a buddy to your new hire. A Buddy is someone whom your new hire would confide in. Also, a buddy can be not someone in a position superior to that of your new hire.

Email #3: Sent  on -10th Day: Documentation Reap 

Now imagine, what would you want to do as a new hire? You don’t want someone to ruin your first day by swamping you with a ton of paperwork. In that case, you as an HR, have to be proactive and get all the paperwork done before D-day. You can consider automating most of this portion by employing a comprehensive HR stack for onboarding that allows your candidates to e-sign, create an onboarding checklist, and do more. 

Nudge the new hires with gentle reminders in case they have not submitted their documents as they near the deadline. Get all the documents signed and submitted before day one. You can also grant access to an Employee self-service portal where the new hires can enter their important details all by themselves. This also ensures that there’s no room for human errors and saves a lot of time.

Here is an email template where you can introduce the employee to your portal, ask them to log in and finish necessary paperwork procedures as instructed in the tool. 

Email #4: Sent  on -5th Day: New Employee Tips for Success by HR

Done collecting all the imperative documents? Now is the time to share some stories. As an HR, you can encourage, engage, and motivate employees with short anecdotes about some of the successful employees in your company. When new hires are seeing it for themselves, it’s going to ring a bell. In fact, they would be more than happy to learn about the footsteps that such people have taken across the timeline. Create a newsletter of sorts for each department, say Sales, HR, Marketing, Product, Leadership, etc., with each one having stories from people of that domain. Do not think this is a big job, just a one time job which you can update when something huge has to be cut down or added. Trust me, its worth it. 

Here are some tips on what you can add in the newsletter that will motivate your new hires: 

• Talk about setting short-term, achievable and SMART goals in the first 30 days

• Talk about short anecdotes from people the company who struck the right balance between their career and professional development

• Include stories on current employees who balance their passion(like music, baking) or a secondary profession(like DJ, sports, etc)

• Other common things to include: being open to feedback, helping team members if they can, etc

Email #5: Sent on -1st Day: Culture stories

It’s quite natural for any new hire to learn about the insides of the company. This could be information pertaining to your culture, hierarchy, how teams function, social presence, etc. This is going to excite them indeed. Ruminating on that fact, perhaps, this is how word-of-mouth about your employer branding spreads!

Things you want to talk about in your culture stories segment

• Culture stories that reflect the ideal culture
• Tying employee rewards and recognition to a powerfully positive work story.
• The secret sauce behind your high employee retention rates
• What you do beyond just fostering an employee-employer relationship to touch their personal lives?
• How do you stand out from every other employer out there who claim themselves to be “Employee Friendly”?

Email #6: Sent on 0th Day: What to expect on your first day

Your new hires might have a myriad of doubts as to what’s going to happen on their day one. Pry open all the ambiguities around onboarding and alleviate their first day jitters. Confused what you can include in the mail?

Things you can talk about in this mail

Email #7: Sent on 1st Day: Email from the CEO

Surprise them. It isn’t really difficult. Welcome your new hires with a good morning and all the best messages. It can make their day. Especially when it’s a recorded video from your CEO himself. This video can be made to look personal when the person is viewing the message but recorded once every 6 months or so to reinforce a message on what is currently important for the company. This can also be used to reinforce that you value every employee who is joining in and make them feel special. Make this email come from an email alias of the CEO (while it's still triggered by the email automation software) to give that excitement. This can go a LONG WAY and in shaping the experience.  Make them understand that those first-day jitters are always transient and natural and that in the end, it’s all going to be fruitful. We are attaching a template here that we all got from our CEO, you can tailor it to suit the tone and value of yours. 

 

Email #8: Sent on 2nd Day: How was your Day 1?

Survey them --- Ask them a bunch of thoughtful questions and understand what they liked/disliked about the onboarding and given a chance what would they want to change about it. By this, you will come across as someone who genuinely cares about how they feel and hence give them the satisfaction of voicing out their concerns without much effort. There are so many survey tools that you can use to collect and store these data over time to analyze and implement changes in your Onboarding Process. 

Email #9: Sent on 3rd Day: Employee Handbook to help

After two days of introduction, they are going to get started with their work with the new team. But before that, they might have some general concerns about the following things especially in the lines of job satisfaction, payroll& benefits, leave policies, IT security, and other facilities. We are sure most organizations would cover this all in their Onboarding session, but not everyone takes notes or remembers everything they hear. Given there is so much information coming at them, your new hires would want a document to refer to whenever they can to get answers to their questions like the below. So, create an Employee Handbook document that you share with the new hires easily after the onboarding session is over. Again, does not take much work to compile this but has huge benefits. You would hardly need to update them as most of these procedures stay the same for years. 

Email #10: Sent on 4th Day: Your first Month with <Company>

Everyone likes to know what they’d be up to at the end of 30 days when they join a new company. Tag and remind the manager about setting goals for the new hire. The manager can take it forward from there. They can sit together and chalk out job-specific goals.

 

Email #11: Sent on the 30th Day: Checking In

Your role as an HR is not over as you reach the end of the first week of onboarding rather, it is here from where it all starts. Moving forward, you can begin proving your ingenuity through frequent check-ins about how they are feeling about work so far.  Ask them the right questions in your email or maybe attach it as a survey, however you like, but do check in with them after their first 30 days. 

Email #12: Sent on the 60th Day: Checking In #2 

This is one of the most important check-ins that you do as your new hires would have figured things out by now. They know whether or not they like the company, how much they fit into the culture, how are they transitioning into the new role and how valued they feel. Ask them all. If possible, fix a 1-1 with them and understand their pain points and sweet spots. Studies say that by the first 60 days a new hire thinks of other opportunities if they do not see a clear career path in their current company, so it is very important to have this check-in to better your employee retention rates. 

 

That’s all! Your new employee welcome email templates are ready and done! The true power of a well-timed welcome email lies in understanding what type of content your candidates would like to read from you and then timing it right. And, you can nail setting up a welcome email campaign by just personalizing content for your new hires to keep them engaged, motivated, and excited about their new job. 

If you get this right, be sure no employee would leave your company anytime soon. Happy Onboarding :)