Every digital marketer has to determine their ideal email frequency in order to maximize profit and response to their email marketing program. The purpose of this post isn’t to give you a magic number of emails to send (Here’s how you can find the right mailing frequency yourself), but rather to show you how to intelligently increase your email frequency (and revenues). Starting with the tactic of – resend and remind.
Intelligently increase email frequency: resend and remind
Resending your email is the practice of sending the exact same email to the non-openers of the original email, preferably with a different subject line. That is a quick win: minimum effort, extra results. Some companies have made an art of this practice and do it with a big percentage of their emails, you can expect an average lift of 15-20% in response rate for the 2 emails combined. The results can be even higher; a case study of the non-profit Avera McKennan Foundation boosted their donations by 55%.
How many emails do they see?
You might feel the question arising: “If I resend my emails, would my subscribers appreciate it?” Not every email is seen by every recipient every time. How many emails does your audience see? Marketers can quickly get confused about the number of emails that are actually seen by their subscribers.
Say you send monthly and have a 25% open rate on average, 70% of your list has shown some activity in the last year. That means that in the most optimistic case, it would take at least three months for your active subscribers to open even one of your emails. That doesn’t seem that often at all. Combined with the increased results I mentioned before, resending becomes an interesting approach for most marketers.
To resend and remind more intelligently
I thought I’d share some tactics of how to resend more intelligently and improve on your email strategy.
1. Do a better exclusion
Send your second email to the non-openers only, but also… exclude the people that have already bought or converted on the offer. There are plenty of customers that don’t click through on the email, but still go to your website after seeing it (spontaneously, or stimulated through other channels). No need to send them the same email again, this requires some integration of your mail marketing software with your website and order / ecommerce systems though.
2. Do a subject line test with a different winner
Do a subject line test with the first email. See which subject lines gather the best response overall (use that for the first mail) and which gets the biggest portion of people that don’t open the email very frequently, to open the email (use that for the second email – to the people that don’t open often). This is a way to spot the thing that didn’t work towards your goals in the first place (more active subscribers). And improve on that: Stop “staring at the bullet holes”.
Other resending subject line tactics include:
- Adding personalization if it wasn’t used the first time,
- Highlighting a different benefit from the first subject line,
- Adding a deadline or last chance
- Acknowledging it as a resend for instance by adding “Reminder” or “In case you missed”
3. Align the content
Change the headline and subheaders in the second mail. This will make the email look “fresh” to the group that did see your email the first time and just scanned it (even if they had images off). The important thing is to keep a logical connection between the subject line and the headline to get the optimal flow in your email.
4. Use a different Call to Action
Preferably use a lower commitment call to action. For instance “view offer” or “more info” instead of “register” or “buy now”. This can lower the barrier to interaction for the remaining group.
5. Wait!
Yes, don’t resend the email straight away. More than half of the email opens will occur in the first seven after sending. But especially if your frequency is weekly or less, wait and give the long tail a chance to open the first mail.
6. Send it at a different day and time of day.
Some of us are morning openers, some of us are opening email all day long. If your email list is built up like most brands, you can have a combination of business and personal email addresses. Not all people check their email at the same time. Personal send time optimization can further improve the results, so the things you can do here is to evaluate the best time send your email campaigns or use features like Perfect Timing to have it done for you, automatically.
Remember this
Resending is a tactic that can be a big conversion and email marketing ROI booster. So consider using it wisely and for instance only to your best offers. While doing so, make sure your campaigns are designed according to all of the good practices.
Do you resend your emails, or plan to? Share your experience below.
