Resending Unopened Emails: A Hack to Increase Audience Engagement
When you run an email list, you might see some subscribers have unopened emails from you. You might wonder if they aren’t interested in your offer. But since they signed up to receive your content, it’s more likely that they simply missed it or it ended up in their spam folder.
A good way to boost engagement on your list is to resend unopened emails.
Autoresponder programs like MailChimp have features that allow you to resend unopened messages. If you have an important message that your subscriber hasn’t opened, you can resend it the next day to bring it to their attention.
One word of caution: resending is that it can appear spammy. This is why you should resend sparingly or only do it once. Try resending on the next day to give people enough time to see the original one first.
For example, you might send an email announcing your latest blog post. While 40% of your subscribers opened it, this means 60% didn’t. This is an especially good piece of content and you feel it’s a shame for more than half of your subscribers to pass it by, so you decide to resend.
Email Marketing Tips – Resending Unopened Emails
How to Refresh Resent Emails
The trick here is to change the subject line of your email.
It’s possible that your subscribers skimmed over it because your subject line wasn’t compelling enough to hook them. With a new and slightly different subject line, you can increase the chances that they will check it out.
This will increase your email open rates and hopefully drive more traffic to your blog. It also helps build deeper relationships with your readers.
Segmenting Your List
You can also use your unopen rate can also to segment your list.
If there are subscribers who consistently don’t open your messages, they may be unresponsive or may have a bad email address. Remove these subscribers from your list. This is called keeping a “clean and healthy” list and it improves the performance of your email campaigns.
There are some marketing studies that question this approach. After all, if you resend every single email, you’re cramming your subscribers’ email inboxes even fuller with messages.
Your autoresponder program gives you statistics that show the results of your efforts. Rely on these metrics and see how many of your subscribers are opening the second emails. If you’re seeing higher open rates, keep doing it but again, do it sparingly. If you don’t, take a pause and review your email marketing strategy.
What’s your personal take on resending unopened emails? Let me know in the comments below.
