If at first you don’t succeed – try and try again.
It’s a message that’s been drilled into us since childhood.
But how well does it stack up when it comes to your email marketing?
If you send an email and it doesn’t perform as well as you hoped, should you resend it to people who didn’t open it?
On the plus side, some people who missed it or were too busy the first time might take a look and you’ll get a few more opens, clicks and (hopefully) conversions.
But on the down side, some people will get annoyed by the additional email and might unsubscribe. After all, they may have deliberately left the original email unopened. Or they may have actually opened it without displaying the images so the email is reported as not being opened.
As you can see – it’s a bit more complicated than just resending the email and hoping for the best.
But if you are going to resend an email to non-openers, let’s explore some tips for getting the most out of it.
1. Only resend the most important email campaigns.
Suppose that every time a subscriber left one of your emails unopened, you resent it. Imagine in time how annoyed that person would get. It probably wouldn’t be too long until they unsubscribed from all of your email marketing messages.
As well as being annoying, resending every one of your emails is a bad idea because it actually trains subscribers to ignore them. They’ll start to think it’s ok to not read your email because you’re going to resend it to them anyway.
So pick your most important email campaigns and limit your resending to just those ones.
2. Tweak your email subject line.
They say that insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect different results. I think the same thing applies when you resend an email without changing the subject line.
The subject line plays an important part in capturing your reader’s attention and enticing them to open the email. If it didn’t work the first time, what makes you think it’ll work the second time?
One way to tweak the subject line is to add words like “reminder” or “last chance” in order to create a sense of urgency. Alternatively you could write a new subject line that takes a completely different approach to your original one.
Tweaking the subject line also has the added bonus of letting readers know this email was not resent by mistake. It lets them know that you think the email is important enough to be resent and that you don’t want them to miss out by not reading it. Of course this is a pretty big statement so make sure you follow the tactic above and only resend the most important email campaigns.
3. Adjust the timing of your resend.
When it comes to timing your resend, make sure you give people enough time to respond to your original email.
Look at your previous email campaigns and identify how much time it takes for most people to open them. Do NOT resend your email within this timeframe.
If you don’t have access to this information, a good waiting period before resending your email is 3 days. This is when 91.66% of people who open emails have done so according to the Email Marketing Metrics Report Australia.
It’s also helpful to resend your email at a different time of day than your original email. Someone might not have had time to read your email when you sent it at 9am. But they might have time at midday, so resending it at this time might get a different result.
4. Measure the impact – both good and bad.
The entire goal of resending your email is to encourage a few more opens and clicks in hope of driving additional conversions. But as I mentioned above, this can come at a cost. Some people may respond negatively to the additional email in their inbox and unsubscribe.
So be sure to measure the unsubscribe rate of your email resend and weigh this up against the additional conversions that it creates. If too many people are dropping off your list because of the resend, it’s probably not worth it.