Your first onboarding emails

Some best practices for building your sender reputation with onboarding emails.

We covered the basics of a Sender Reputation in this guide and this guide will cover some best practices for building your sender reputation with onboarding emails.

If you’re new to Loops, we recommend taking some specific steps to help warm up your sending reputation and to ensure your emails land in inboxes.

We want to start with an onboarding Loop and transactional emails before we send larger campaigns to a large list. When we send those larger campaigns, we want to first start with a small list and then slowly increase volume while monitoring the results.

Onboarding welcome loop

The first step is to set up a welcome email sent to users after they sign up to your application or subscribe to your list. Recipients of these emails are expecting the email and are most likely to engage with it.

For example, new users who sign up could expect a welcome email from you, welcoming them to your platform and explaining some initial steps to get them started.

Here is an example of the email we at Loops send out to new users:

Loop templates

Check out our library of useful templates for creating welcome emails.

Users receive these emails because they expect them, so they are more likely to open and engage with them, building your sender reputation.

Get started by creating loops, which are email automations used to send emails after certain triggers, like a new contact joining your audience or after an event happens in your platform.

Creating a welcome loop in Loops

1. Create a loop

   Go to your Loops page and click New, or select from one of our ready-made templates.

2. Set the trigger

   Set your trigger to Contact added if you want the loop to fire for every new contact. You can also set a filter to only send to contacts with a specific tag or property, or specifically target it to a specific list.

   Select Event received if you want to trigger the loop based on something happening in an external platform.

3. Add an email

   Next, write your email by clicking on the Send email node.
   Make sure to make your loop active by clicking Start.

Transactional emails

Transactional emails are by definition emails that are sent to users because of an action they took or need to take to use your platform. Since all emails from Loops send from a single domain and IP, we can also use these emails to build our sender reputation. We recommend starting with these essential transactional emails:

• Login verification emails
• Password reset emails
• Account confirmation emails

These types of emails have high engagement rates since users actively request them, which helps build your sender reputation.

Transactional templates

Check out our library of useful transactional email templates.

Targeted campaign

Once your welcome loop has been active and sending for 2 or 3 days, you should see an open rate of around 40% on the first email after the welcome email.

Now you can start to send a campaign to a small list of engaged users. Here are two recommended approaches:

1. Target recent signups using the createdAt property to find users added in the last 3 days
2. Target active users by syncing login data to track your most engaged users

For your first campaign content, we recommend: ✅ Product updates or new feature announcements ❌ Avoid generic newsletters, giveaways or promotional content

Important metrics to monitor:

• Campaign open rate should be above 30%
• Welcome loop open rate should stay above 40%
• If either drops below these thresholds, pause sending and re-evaluate

Loops helps to mitigate deliverability issues by sending campaign emails in batches, waiting to check open rates and then sending further emails in your list depending on the results. We take great care to make sure your emails have the highest deliverability as possible from our side.

Sending a campaign to active users in Loops

1. Define and label "active" users

   You can use the default createdAt contact property, or you can create custom contact properties and use the API or an integration to update contacts when an event happens in your account (e.g. a log in).

   For example, you could use the name lastActive and choose the “Date” field type. Then whenever the user does a major action in your application, update the contact with a new lastActive value:

   POST /v1/contacts/update
   {
     "userId": user.id,
     "lastActive": new Date().getTime() // timestamp in milliseconds
   }
   

2. Send the campaign to your segment

   Once you have created your campaign in Loops, you need to specify the audience based on your chosen date field.

   In the “Audience” tab, choose “Last Active” (or “Created At”), then “After” and then pick the date three days ago from the date field.

   

Larger campaigns

Now you have warmed up your account, you can start to send out larger campaigns to more contacts.

You may want to import users from another email platform of your application’s user database.

We still recommend to not send to everyone on your list. Try to identify segments in your user list (especially if it’s in the thousands) that are most likely to open emails from you.

Read more

Improve your inbox placement

Understand email open rates

Delivery optimization

Build your sender reputation