Details on how it all works:
Step One: Turning lurkers into Members
After looking at my own referral statistics it was evident that almost all of my traffic was coming in through subpages from Google or other search engines. This raised an immediate concern as I realized that vBulletin 3.5 only contains a welcome message on the forum homepage. While it may be evident to any forum admin what a forum is about and why you should register I would imagine that a lot of users in a non-technical area might have no clue what my site was about or how they could join. Therefore it seemed important to move the welcome message to every page and to customize it to speak out about the exact community the user was visiting.
Step Two: Making Users Confirm their Account
Just because a user isn't confirmed doesn't mean they don't want to use your site; often time a user signs up with the wrong email address, forgets to confirm or their spam filter blocks the welcome email. Whatever the reason I found that many registered users were coming back to my site, logging in but not doing anything because they simply didn't know what was wrong with their accounts. Going off the header I had created for lurkers/ new users I added another snippet of code to inform unconfirmed users that they were indeed unconfirmed and to give them a link to get their confirmation codes and another link directly to support if they ran into problems.
Step Three: Get non-posting users to post
Another chronic problem faced by many forums is insuring users post after registering. Looking at other forums that I have personally registered for I began to realize that many new users, especially former lurkers would complete the registration process but not post because of the hurtles involved in getting into the board (registering, confirming). As a way to combat this part of the problem I added a third and final header for users with no posts. This header reminds the user about the forum and entices them to go to the intro & greets forum where they can post directly and get involved in the community.
Step Four: Getting inactive users to become more active
Because many members post once or twice and then go off and merely "lurk" I decide it would be wise to add a fourth and final welcome header to remind these users to come back and make another post. While not as powerful of a message this is certainly helpful in keeping your posting rate up and since it only appears after 14 days of inactivity most users should not have a problem with the message.
The results:
Since speculation is really nothing more than a guess, the real value of welcome headers only became evident after I evaluated a complete month worth of statistics. In just thirty days my own forum increased posting rates by over 3,500 posts a month. New user registration went up by over 250 users which translated into nearly 10 new users a day. User activity went up 50% and my welcome/ intro & greets forum has exploded from 10 posts a day to pages of post every day. Skip forward around a year and many sites have begun running their own version of welcome headers with fantastic results. For my own site, daily user activity has risen by well over 250% to more than 2,500 users per day, registrations have increased by more than 60%, and retention it at an all time high. In all areas that the welcome headers targeted we have seen remarkable improvements both in our short term and the long term growth goals.
