There are definitely differing opinions about the practice of resending to non-openers a few days after an initial email send. There are many reasons why a recipient did not open your email the first time around:
- They may have been too busy at the time to read it
- They may have deleted it by accident
- The subject line may not have interested them
- They may have read your email content without turning images on
- They may have read the plain text version of your email
- and so on and so on.
The key thing to remember though, is that if a recipient did read your email without turning images on and did not open it’s likely that they just weren’t interested in your message, and won’t open the second time around. To try and engage those who were just too busy the first time, can be an attractive idea to marketers. We spend a lot of time creating our finely tuned email campaigns. Why not try and generate that little bit more ROI from all of that effort?
On the other hand, is the extra ROI worth the risk of a potentially higher unsubscribe rate, a higher number of spam reports and the risk of annoying people who have read and dismissed your email in the preview pane.
In November 2011, we launched our new “Resend to non-openers” button within the campaigns in MessageFocus. Many of our clients had asked for an easy way to extend the longevity of the email messages, without lots of effort and this was a great answer to their requests. Since then, we have undertaken some research into what impact the use of this functionality has had on our clients results and we’d like to share them with you here.
The results:
- The resent email achieved an open rate that was half that of the original send. So if Email 1 achieved a 20% open rate, the follow up to those who did not open the first time, will achieve around a 10% open rate, increasing your reach by around 50%.
- Unsub rates of the resend were on average 0.06% less than the original email send.
These results show that resending your email campaign to non-openers can increase your email campaign ROI with minimal extra effort. However, it’s important to keep an eye on your results. If you see a big increase in your unsubscribe rate then you need to decide whether it’s worth losing those people, in exchange for the extra opens and clicks? Also, remember to look at the click through rate. If you are getting more opens, but people aren’t clicking through, is it really worth sending the email again?
As with many things in email marketing, give it a test. You’ll never know unless you try and our research shows resending to non-openers can have a big impact on your results.
Reena Mistry
Marketing Director