Messages don’t always hit home the first time we hear them.
So why would you only give your emails one chance of resonating with your audience?
We often assume that sending the same email to a customer numerous times is a bad idea. After all, you don’t want to annoy your prospects with repetitive content. However, there are many reasons why people don’t always engage with an email first time around.
Sometimes, a message might arrive at the wrong time when your customer doesn’t have a chance to read it. Alternatively, if you’re using the wrong email service provider, it might go straight to spam. There’s even a chance that your emails aren’t hitting home because you’re not focusing on the right pain points and benefits for your customer.
That’s why most email marketing campaigns should come with a strategy for email resending.
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The Benefits of Email Resending
There are a right way and a wrong way to resend your email campaigns.
Choose the wrong way, and you become that pesky company who ends up relegated to a customer spam folder. Pick the right way, and resending your emails gives you a second chance to engage your audience and drive sales.
You can even use email resending to test new ways of connecting with your customers and breathing life into your campaigns. According to Neal Taparia’s article in Forbes, resending the same email to an audience again led to 21.3% more opens.
If you segment your audience and A/B test different subject lines, offers, and details as part of your resending campaign, your results could be even better.
So, how do you master the art of resending?
Here are some questions to ask along the way.
1. Which Emails Should You Resend?
First things first, not every email in your campaign will benefit from email resending.
If you send every message multiple times, you’ll end up cluttering your customer’s inbox, which means that your chances of an unsubscribe or trip to spam is much higher.
When deciding where to start resending, consider your options carefully. Which messages are going to deliver the most value to your audience? For instance, a standard weekly update about the latest blogs on your website might be a shame for your customers to miss. However, an email about a limited time sale is something they definitely don’t want to ignore.
It’s also worth considering how you’re going to offer new value in this email that your customer might not have noticed before. For instance, if you think your customers are still on the fence about buying your on-sale items, could you include some social proof to move things along?
Customers will undoubtedly get sick of you and your business after a while if they’re getting multiples of everything you send. Choose your options wisely, and make sure you pay attention to your metrics. How many people open the emails that you resend? Which messages get the most attention the second time around?
2. What Do I Need to Change?
You’ve decided to send an email to your audience again. Now you need to figure out if you’re going to send the exact same email as before, or a slightly tweaked version.
Although you can probably save yourself some time by sending the same email, your chances of getting excellent results and conversions are pretty limited here. Remember, the average employee spends around 28% of their work week on their email inbox. You don’t want to run the risk of your customers seeing the same messages over and over.
Using an email marketing software like Active Campaign, head into your A/B testing segment and look at things like:
- Subject lines
- Body copy
- “From” name
- Images and layout
- Call-to-action buttons
- Send time
A/B testing for each audience segment will give you a better idea of what your customers respond to. Remember that there are different people in your community, and you need to know how to speak to each of them. When A/B testing, make sure you only test one variable at a time.
Scientific study proves that you’ll be more likely to get meaningful insights from your tests if you focus on only switching out one feature at a time.
3. Have I Made Any Mistakes?
Often, you’ll find your customers haven’t clicked on your email campaign because there’s something about the message that needs to change. It might be the offer, the subject line, or something else entirely. Other times, you could be having the wrong impact on your customer because of a mistake in your content.
Errors in your subject line prevent customers from opening your emails in the first place. No-one has the time to deal with a company that doesn’t even bother to proof-read. If you do manage to earn a click with a good subject line, then issues with your internal content could send prospects running in the opposite direction.
Before resending anything, make sure you double and triple-check every part of your email for issues. If you notice that you have made a mistake, reach out to your audience and apologize for wasting their time.
Being courteous and respecting your customer’s time is more likely to deliver positive results for your business. You might even decide to follow up on your mistake with a discount code or free shipping. Rewarding customers with a treat means that they’ll be more likely to click on your erroneous emails in the future – and forgive you for mistakes.
4. Who Should I Send this Email To?
Resending an email makes a lot of sense if you want to increase your chances of connecting with a customer. It doesn’t make sense, however, to reach out again to people who have already opened or clicked your emails and decided your offer wasn’t right for them.
One of the best ways to boost your chances of a positive relationship with your customer, is to customize every message to each client. Be selective about who you send your emails too, and which messages they get.
For instance, you might send the exact same email to people who didn’t open or click your last message. For people who opened the email and didn’t click on the offer, you could use a similar subject line, with a different offer. For people who clicked on your CTA, but didn’t convert, focus on updating your landing page.
Sending the same message en masse to your entire audience doesn’t make sense, because each person may be interacting with your brand in a different way.
People who actually opened or clicked on your content don’t want to see the same message over and over. Using this approach is more likely to get you classified as spam.
5. When Should I Send This Email?
You’ve figured out which messages you’re going to resend, how you’re going to change them, and even who you’re going to be connecting with. Now you need to get the timing right.
As with most things in marketing, it’s essential to walk the line between urgency when you’re guiding your customers through their buying journey, and patience. It’s going to seem pretty rude if you re-send an email after not hearing back from your customer or seeing any engagement after a day.
The key to finding the right timing is to look at your user personas and figure out how frequently your customers usually respond to your emails.
The Forbes article we mentioned above says that resending a message later on can increase your email reach by 54.7%. However, this only works when you get the timing right. Go too quick and you come across as annoying. Wait too long and you come off as desperate, clingy, and even spammy.
Tools like ActiveCampaign help you with automated triggering processes that make it easier to send messages at the right moments.
Ask yourself:
- How many emails (per day/week) are your customers already getting from you?
- How long has it been since you sent the last message?
- How long have you waited to resend emails in the past? (What worked before?)
- How frequently do your customers engage with emails?
What’s Next?
The last stage in your email resending campaign is figuring out what comes next.
If resending your emails doesn’t lead to a conversion, then you have two options. You can either clean your list of the unengaged subscribers who aren’t interested in your offers and try again. Or you can try a new campaign on your disengaged customers and see if they respond better to that.
If resending your emails does generate results, then you need to learn from that.
Look at your email marketing metrics and find out which components, subject lines, deals, and other elements your customers are responding to best. This will help you to better optimize your email efforts in the future.
The more you learn from each campaign, the easier it will be to figure out not only which messages you should resend in the future, but how you can optimize them to boost your results.
Eventually, your insights will give you a perfect overview of when, where, how, and why to manage your resending strategy. Don’t forget, using an email automation tool will make this process much easier. Being able to automate your campaigns according to different triggers reduces the headache of having to send every message manually.
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