The first message to a new member with no order is the welcome message on sign-up day. Send the first reminder once most members who were going to buy on their own have already ordered; waiting a few days for products bought on impulse and a few weeks for products people think over is a reasonable starting point. If the welcome carried a time-limited code, the reminder goes out two or three days before it runs out. If the code expires and there is still no order, send one last invitation with a reason other than a bigger code, such as delivery, returns or new products, and then move the member onto your regular campaign calendar.
You can set the reminder day from your own sign-up and order records and decide which message takes priority when a product left in the cart, a question the member sent you or an upcoming sale week disrupts the schedule. We also cover the sending hour, where to end the sequence that starts with the welcome, a separate rule for members who join during sale weeks and the two rates that show whether your chosen timing works, all with examples.
Send only the welcome message on sign-up day
Someone who has just filled in your sign-up form knows your store’s name and is probably still browsing your site. The only message they should get that day is the welcome: it tells them the account is open and gives them a link to start shopping. Do not send a second promotional message on the same day, such as a new-arrivals announcement or a campaign reminder; the member would get two promotional messages from your store on the day they opened the account.
Whether the welcome carries a code also shapes the rest of the schedule. A time-limited welcome code gives the sequence a deadline, and the reminder day is then chosen around that date. A welcome without a code has no such date: you pick the first reminder day purely from how long your members take to decide, and any offer you want to make waits for that message. Our article comparing the two types of first-order discount works out with numbers whether to make that offer a fixed sum or a percentage.
Automated welcome message: the consent condition and a sample
Pushouse’s WhatsApp new member welcome module sends this message automatically to people who create an account on your site; you can include a welcome gift voucher or keep to the welcome text alone. People who have not explicitly given contact permission do not receive campaign messages, and a customer who opens a new account does not get the welcome a second time. Keep the same condition for the later messages in the sequence: Article 6 of Law No. 6563 on the Regulation of Electronic Commerce (Elektronik Ticaretin Düzenlenmesi Hakkında Kanun), Türkiye’s e-commerce law, allows commercial electronic messages only with the recipient’s prior consent. You can find how to set up the consent box on your forms in the permission-list section of our e-commerce sales growth guide.
A welcome without a code can be short:
Hello {{customer name}}, your membership is complete. You can follow your orders and the products you like from your {{store name}} account.
New arrivals: {{new arrivals link}}
To stop our promotional messages, tap “Stop promotions” below.
How many days after sign-up should the first reminder go out?
The reminder’s job is to move a member who would not decide on their own. Sent too early, it reaches people who would have ordered the next day anyway: the message cost is wasted, and if it carries a code, you give that discount to an order that would have come without it. Sent too late, it finds a member who may have forgotten your store and why they signed up; blocking a message from a store whose name they don’t remember comes easily.
With Pushouse’s WhatsApp first purchase incentive module, the length of the wait is up to you. A customer who has shopped even once never enters this list; the message addresses the member by name, and you can add a discount code to it if you wish. Because a member who has received the incentive once is not added to the same campaign again, plan a single reminder when you choose the day, and don’t count on a second chance from the same flow.
Set the reminder day by the code’s expiry or the first-order curve
If the welcome carried a time-limited code, the reminder day is tied to its end date: as we recommend in our article on how long a welcome code should last, the message goes out two or three days ahead of the expiry. Don’t send a separate general reminder before that; otherwise the member gets three messages in a short time: the welcome, the reminder and the expiry notice.
Without a welcome code, the right day comes from the pattern of first orders your members place on their own. In the same article we showed step by step how to match sign-up dates with first-order dates and why members who sign up on the day of their order should be kept apart. This time, use the list to answer one question: for each day after sign-up, how much has the proportion of members with a first order grown? Plot the shares day by day and the curve flattens after a certain point, with only a few orders added each day; the reminder should arrive after that point. Do the calculation with members who joined in periods when you sent no reminder and that did not fall in sale weeks; otherwise the curve mixes your members’ decision time with the effect of your own messages.
Waiting time for impulse buys and considered purchases
Take two hypothetical stores. In a costume jewelry store, most first orders after sign-up come in the first three days, and after the fourth day only one or two orders are added each day. There, the reminder should arrive after the fourth day; an earlier message reaches members who are already about to decide. In a store selling beds and bed bases, first orders spread over weeks, and new ones still come in every day in the third week. In a store like that, a reminder in the first week feels like pressure to a member who is still deciding and will most likely coincide with an order that would have come anyway.
If your records are not yet enough for this calculation, look at which of the two examples your store is closer to. Choose a short wait for cheap products bought on impulse, like jewelry, and a wait measured in weeks for expensive products people think over, like beds. Once enough records have built up, adjust the day to your own curve.
Don’t point out in the reminder that they haven’t bought yet
Don’t stress in the reminder that the member hasn’t shopped yet. The person may have ordered without logging in, with a different email address or from your store on a marketplace; a line like “you haven’t shopped with us yet” gives such a person wrong information and makes a member who really hasn’t shopped feel watched. Build the message around information that makes the first order easier, and say you are ready to answer any question:
Hello {{customer name}}, we’ve put the products {{store name}} customers chose most this month on one page: {{link}}
Orders placed before {{dispatch time}} are shipped the same day. Questions about sizes or a product? Just reply to this message.
To stop promotional messages, you can tap “Stop promotions” below.
If the code has expired, give the last invitation a different reason
For a member who let the welcome code expire without using it, the easiest-looking move is to send a new or bigger code. A new code right after the old one ends shows that the deadline in your message wasn’t real and may teach the member to wait for the next code. We covered the legal side of keeping deadlines genuine in our welcome coupon article.
So write the last invitation around something other than price. If you know which category the member looked at, new products in that category are a good reason. If you don’t, answer the question your customer service hears most often: how long delivery takes, how exchanges work if the size doesn’t fit, or who pays for return shipping. The day of this message depends more on the news than on the calendar; send it when new products go live on the site or when your delivery or returns terms change. Leave at least a few weeks between the code’s expiry and this message. An invitation that arrives right after the expiry reads as a reminder of the missed code, even when it carries no code.
Plan the last invitation as a separate bulk send
If you sent the reminder through a one-time flow, plan the last invitation as a separate send. From your platform’s member and order exports, pick out the members whose code has expired, who have never ordered and whose contact permission is still active. Before sending, match the numbers against the phone numbers in your order records so that people who ordered without logging in do not stay on the list. You can upload this list to Pushouse’s WhatsApp bulk messaging module and time the send for the day the new products go live.
A sample invitation combining new products and delivery terms
An invitation that combines new-product news with delivery and exchange information could look like this:
Hello {{customer name}}, new-season products are now live in our {{category name}} category: {{category link}}
Your order reaches you within {{delivery time}}. If the size doesn’t fit, the exchange is free.
If you’d rather not get our promotional messages, just tap “Stop promotions” below.
Write the second line to match your own terms; don’t put a delivery time or a free-exchange promise in the message that you can’t keep for every order.
Situations that change the schedule
The schedule counted from sign-up day holds as long as the member does nothing and no big campaign comes in between. In the four situations below, the member’s behavior or your campaign calendar decides the next message.
The member left something in the cart
A product added to the cart tells you far more clearly than a general reminder what the member is interested in. From that point on, it is the job of the WhatsApp cart recovery message. If the first purchase reminder also goes out the same week, the member gets two sales messages in a short time, and the second is a general invitation that never mentions the product in the cart. If you run both flows, check your send logs in the first weeks; if you see the same member getting two messages within one week, change the reminder day accordingly.
The member asked you a question
If the member asked on WhatsApp about sizes, shipping or payment, your answer takes the reminder’s place. According to Meta’s documentation on sending messages, a user’s message to a business starts a 24-hour customer service window; while it is open, you can reply without an approved template and include a product link in your answer. Reply the same day. An automated “we’re waiting for you” message the day after the conversation can make it look as if nobody read the chat; if the reminder falls on those days, leave this member off that send if possible.
A sale week is about to start
If the reminder day falls on the first days of a big campaign, merge the two messages: the member gets the campaign’s opening message and no separate first purchase reminder. Leave a reminder that falls just before the campaign to the campaign as well. A member who pays full price after a reminder and soon sees the same product on sale starts their relationship with your store with a price difference.
The member joined during a sale week
During the big sales on 11.11 (Singles’ Day, a major shopping date in Türkiye) and around Black Friday at the end of November, sign-ups can run higher than in a normal week. Some of the people who join in these weeks may have come for one specific discounted product: such a member either orders while the campaign is running or may lose interest once the discount ends. Don’t send them a separate first purchase reminder while the campaign is running; members who gave contact permission already receive your campaign messages.
When the sale ends, the reason some of these members signed up ends with it. In the first message after the sale, don’t bring the discount up again, and don’t try to make up for the missed deal with a new code. New-season products, New Year’s gifts or your delivery and exchange terms can take the discount’s place as reasons:
Hello {{customer name}}, for anyone looking for a New Year’s gift, we’ve gathered products in the {{price range}} range on one page: {{link}}
Orders placed by {{last order date}} are delivered before New Year’s.
You can opt out of promotional messages with the “Stop promotions” button below.
What time of day should the message go out?
The welcome message has no timing problem. The member is most likely on your site at that moment and expects a message confirming the account; even someone who signs up at midnight can get the welcome right away. The reminder, however, arrives days later, at a moment the member isn’t expecting it, and the sign-up hour is a poor guide for it. Someone who signs up at 1 a.m. may be browsing comfortably at that hour, but they don’t want the reminder to arrive at the same time.
Choose the reminder’s hour from your own order records. Look at the hours of the day when your first orders cluster and schedule the message at the start of those hours, so it appears at a time when your customers shop. Leave out late night and early morning. Send it when your team is around to answer replies the same day: a reminder can prompt a question, and an unanswered question becomes a new obstacle to the first order. If a campaign announcement goes to the same member that day, move the reminder to the next suitable day.
Cap the sequence that starts with the welcome at three messages
When you set up messages for customers who sign up but don’t buy, it is tempting to take a ready-made welcome series from your email automation and move it to WhatsApp unchanged. The welcome templates Shopify added to its email automations in 2023 were built to send more than one email in the first few days after someone joins the list; both templates had four emails, and the fourth went only to people who hadn’t bought. On WhatsApp, the same intensity costs more: according to Meta’s documentation, WhatsApp may set a per-user limit on the marketing templates a person receives from businesses, and every template delivered counts toward it. Each unnecessary message can also stand in the way of a campaign you send that member later.
For members with no order yet, keep the dedicated sequence to three messages at most:
- The welcome message on sign-up day, with or without a code.
- A single reminder: two or three days ahead of the code’s expiry if you gave one; otherwise after the day when first orders that come on their own thin out.
- If no order comes after the reminder either, a last invitation written around something other than price, a few weeks after the code expires or after the reminder.
When does the sequence end and the campaign calendar begin?
After the third message, the member joins the same campaign calendar as your other customers. Our piece on campaign message frequency covers how often campaign messages should go to members without an order, and our article on which customer groups to separate covers what changes in the campaign text for this group.
Sometimes you should end the sequence earlier. A member who asks to leave the list leaves both the sequence and your campaigns; process opt-out requests on the day they arrive so the next message doesn’t slip through. Don’t send the third message to a member who opened neither the welcome nor the reminder and tapped no link; move them straight to the campaign calendar. A member who places a first order drops out of this group by definition; the first messages they get from then on are order and shipping notifications.
Adjust the reminder day based on the results
Two rates tell you whether the reminder day works: the share of members who place a first order and the share who leave the list after each message. Calculate the first rate in groups by sign-up week: of the members who joined in a given week, how many placed their first order within a set period after signing up? Choose a period that extends a few weeks beyond the day of the last message in the sequence. If the reminder only pulls orders that were coming anyway slightly forward, you won’t see it over a short period: the share for the first days rises, while the share at the end of the period stays where it was.
Compare members who received the reminder with members who didn’t: if your tool lets you keep a small, randomly selected part of new members out of the reminder, use that group; if it doesn’t, use members who signed up in the weeks before you switched the reminder on. We explained how to set aside the group that gets no message, and why a comparison with an earlier period stays rough, in our article on measuring cart recovery; the method is the same for a first purchase reminder.
Track opt-outs and redraw the curve regularly
The second rate is the share of members who leave the list within two days of each message; record it separately for the welcome, the reminder and the last invitation. If opt-outs after the reminder are clearly higher than after the welcome, the message is either going out too early or its wording feels heavy to the member. Move the day later first, and don’t touch the wording until you have seen results from members who joined under the new setting. If the reminder carries a code, read any increase together with the code’s cost: if the share in the group that got the reminder is only slightly higher, the code’s discount is largely going to orders that were coming anyway.
Don’t draw the curve once and leave it. When you expand your product range or change your free-shipping threshold or delivery time, your members’ decision time may change too; redraw the curve a few months after such a change and at least once a year. Setting up your welcome and first purchase messages in Pushouse starts with a short note through our contact form.
