Send a welcome email when someone joins a list
One email, sent once, when someone joins — no flow to build.
A welcome email goes out on its own when someone joins one of your lists. It belongs to the list, not to a flow — so you set it up once and every route into that list uses it. If you want several emails over days or weeks, that’s an automation instead.
Set it up
Open the list
Go to Lists and pick the list people will be joining. The welcome card sits on that page.
Write the email
Creating one drops you straight into the designer, the same one campaigns use. Everything works the same way — templates, Penny, merge tags like
{{firstName}}.Choose when it goes
Immediately, or after a delay you pick. Immediately means within seconds of them joining, not on some hourly cycle.
Turn it on
Nothing sends until you do. Switching it on is also when we check the email is ready to go — see below.
What counts as “joining”
This is the part worth reading properly. A welcome email is unrecallable once sent, so it fires for things a person just did, and not for bulk operations you performed on their behalf.
| How they joined | Sends? |
|---|---|
| Confirmed a signup form | Yes |
| You added them to the list by hand | Yes |
| CSV import | Only if you tick the box, and confirm |
| API | Only if the request asks for it |
| Bulk “Add to list” from the contacts table | Never |
The import checkbox is the dangerous one
Importing an existing list of 50,000 people with that box ticked means 50,000 “Welcome!” emails to people who joined you years ago. That produces spam complaints, and complaints are the most expensive thing that can happen to a sender.
So it’s off by default, and ticking it asks you to type YES and shows the real number of people it would email. If that number is zero we skip the confirmation and say so — a scary dialog for a no-op just teaches people to click through the real one.
Bulk “Add to list” never sends, on purpose: selecting forty thousand contacts and adding them to a list is one click, and it should not be able to mail forty thousand people as a side effect. Adding one person from their contact page does send — that’s a deliberate, individual act.
Who never gets it
- Anyone not subscribed. Unsubscribed, bounced and spam-reporting contacts are excluded when they join and again at the moment of sending.
- Anyone who already had it. One welcome per person, ever — leaving and rejoining doesn’t produce a second one.
- Anyone whose email would arrive far too late. If a welcome couldn’t be sent for a week — the account was out of credit, say — we drop it rather than send it. A welcome arriving eleven days after signup is worse than none.
The status check runs twice for a reason: someone can unsubscribe between joining and your delay elapsing, and mailing them anyway is the one mistake here with legal weight.
What we check when you turn it on
Switching a welcome email on is the moment it becomes real mail, so the same rules that apply to a campaign apply here:
- A verified sending address — your own domain, or a free one on ours.
- A postal address for the footer, which the law requires.
- Enough credit to send. Welcome emails are charged at the plain per-email rate with no per-campaign minimum — they go out one at a time, so a minimum would apply to every single one.
- A content check, the same one campaigns get.
If something’s missing we say which. The card is where that gets reported, so if activation refuses, read it there.
Editing it later
You can edit the email whenever you like. But a welcome email is approved once and then sends for months, so we re-check it on every sweep rather than trusting an approval indefinitely.
The practical consequence: a substantial edit takes it offline until it’s checked again. That’s deliberate — you need to see that your change stopped the sending, rather than wondering later why new subscribers went quiet.
Common issues
Someone joined and got nothing
Check how they joined against the table above — a bulk add or an unflagged import never sends. Then check the contact is actually subscribed, and that the welcome is switched on.
It won't switch on
Almost always a missing sending address, a missing postal address, or no credit. The card names which.
It stopped sending after I edited it
Working as intended — an edit sends it back for a check. Look at the card for what it’s waiting on.
I want to send a second email a few days later
That’s an automation. A welcome email is deliberately one email; anything with a sequence belongs on the canvas.
FAQs
Can someone get the welcome email twice?+
No. It’s once per person per list, enforced when the email is queued rather than by us remembering — so rejoining, being re-imported, or a retry after an error all produce nothing.
Does it count towards my daily sending limit?+
Yes. Welcome emails are ordinary mail as far as limits, bounce rates and spam complaints are concerned, which is exactly why they’re counted rather than quietly exempt.
Can I see how it's performing?+
Yes — the card shows opens and clicks, and there’s a full report behind it. Welcome emails also appear on the Automations tab in Analytics, alongside your flows, rather than being mixed into per-campaign averages where one long-running email would distort everything.
What if I want it to go to people on several lists?+
Set one up per list. Each list’s welcome is its own email, which is usually what you want — someone joining your product newsletter shouldn’t get the same note as someone joining an event list.