When do you resend an email?
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on March 04, 2008
Here's the theory...You send out an email and measure the responses. Some people don't open or click on your mail because they are too busy or overlooked your message or were slightly unsure if they should bother taking a closer look.
So you resend the email to these "didn't open, didn't click" addresses. Some now see it for the first time, or have more time to review your email: you get a few more sales.
This approach can work, as case studies verify. And I've seen the resend approach used many times in my inbox (either that or there are a lot of messed up email systems out there sending duplicate emails).
But there are obvious problems which make this simplistic theory a little more complicated.
Some of the recipients who did not open or click on the email did so because, for example...
...they use email clients and webmail services that block images (no open registered) and they found your message irrelevant to their needs (no click).
...they haven't checked their email yet.
Sending the email again to folks like these looks like an error. It might even annoy them. "Your first email was a waste of my time. Now you're sending me it again."
So you got some extra sales, but what damage did you do to relationships with the other recipients?
So my question to you is this: how do you get the benefits of resending an email to non-openers / non-clickers, but without the problems? Should you even try?
My immediate reaction would be to suggest the secret (if you are going to do it) is in the timing, subject line and content.
For example, don't resend the email until you're sure the vast majority of responses you are going to get in total are already in. So you don't annoy people who were about to respond to (or open) your first email anyway.
How about modifying the subject line and content/offer presentation?
The resend is less likely to be seen as a duplicate email sent in error. And maybe a different copywriting approach triggers a more positive reaction in some of those who saw your first mail but didn't judge it worth their time to open or respond to?
What do you think?
Permalink | Add to del.icio.us | 2 comment(s) - add yours!
Get posts like this: as an RSS feed | as a biweekly newsletter
Twice a month, free, packed with email marketing advice and all the posts from this blog.
2 Comments:
I'd support your idea of changing the subject line and creative, but then I'd also suggest that such a mailing might more accurately be called a "follow up" rather than a "resend."
Hell, incorporate it into an A/B creative test and send "B" as a followup to the "A" non-responders and vice versa, so that you can compare open/click/unsub for each creative as both primary and followup message. Hmmmm...interesting idea, I may actually have to do that.
The subscriber annoyance issue that you raise is the weakness that I see in the case study: at the very least I'd like to see the unsubscribe rates associated with the two mailings as a crude view into subscriber reaction.
It may be that the case study saw no significant difference in unsub rates, but that's a very dangerous assumption to have to make.
By 
W.B. McNamara, on
05 March, 2008
Thanks W.B. for the great thoughts. It's definitely a problem that the potential benefits are easily observed ("we made more sales"), but the disbenefits are not so easily observed and thus tend to be ignored in the discussion
By Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on
06 March, 2008
