Don’t forget your email non-openers!

Email marketing best practice -  4 Smart techniques to resend to your non-openers for your email campaigns

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 against improving your email marketing?

For a long time it has been argued that resending emails to recipients that didn’t open the first time around could do more harm than good, but there is also a lot of evidence to suggest it can be an effective way to re-engage with your subscribers so long as you proceed with caution. Here are 4 simple, practical techniques that we have found effective.

• 1. Only resend the most important email campaigns
  Suppose that every time a subscriber left one of your emails unopened, you resent it. Imagine how annoyed your subscriber would get. It probably wouldn’t be too long until they unsubscribed from all of your email marketing messages.

So pick your most important email campaigns and limit your resending to just those ones.

• 2. Change your 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?

Tweaking the subject line also has the added bonus of letting readers know this email was not resent by mistake.

• 3. Change your timing
  There is an option to change the timing of your resend, make sure you give people enough time to open to your original email – we usually recommend waiting at least 3 days.

It’s also helpful to resend your email at a different time of day to your original send. Someone might not have had time to read your email when you sent it at 9am but they might have time at midday.

• 4. Measure the impact
  The entire goal of resending your email is to encourage a few more opens and clicks in hope of driving additional conversions. But 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/