How to improve your campaign ROI using email resend programmes

Your customers and prospects receive countless emails, newsletters and transactional emails – each and every day. Usually, they spontaneously decide whether they should open an email or delete it unread. Obviously, you can have a positive influence on opening behaviour by using the subject line (remember to A/B Test), but you do not have an influence on whether the customer has time to read your message or not.

This is a problem which all email senders are faced with. Recently my colleague, Frank Witthaut, based in Germany, wrote a blog post offering some advice on how to maximise the opportunities to re-engage with your customers by email. I wanted to share his advice as these simple steps are easy to implement and can have a huge positive impact on your campaigns.

The first piece of advice to get in to the right mindset is: instead of identifying non-openers as “not interested”, you should take your chance to implement a resend programme to contact your customers and prospects a second time with the same offer. Resend programmes are very easy to set up and have been proven to increase your open, click and conversion rates of your campaign effectively in the long run.

Frank also addressed some frequently asked questions around resend campaigns which I wanted to include…in case these are buzzing round in your head already:

• Will a resend cause additional costs?
No, besides traffic costs, there are no further costs. A resend is a cost effective way to improve your conversion in the long run.

• Will a resend cost me or my team some extra time?
No, because follow-up campaigns can be created automatically.

• Should I send the same message twice?
Yes, because recipients that have not opened an email do not know the contents. Usually, the subject line wasn’t of interest or they didn’t have time to read your message. Simply write a new subject line and resend.

• Can a resend damage my reputation?
If a recipient has deleted your message on purpose and receives the same one again, it can be reason enough to unsubscribe or mark your message as spam. Usually, for a resend programme, you use a different subject line (obviously, the first one was not attractive enough to be opened) to make it clear to the recipient that it is not the same message again. Still, we recommend, that you should have a test run first – as you should have with every new programme – which allows you to analyse the results of your message. You should keep an eye on the amount of spam complaints and the unsubscribe rate you are receiving.

Many of our customers who have successfully worked with resend programmes have shown vast improvements of 30-40% in their performance indicators from each campaign (openings, clicks, conversion etc). I hope that the stats and evidence of how easy it is to set up a resend programme has inspired you to put these actionable insights in to place. Feel free to share any successes you have by commenting on this post.

Thanks to Frank for originally sharing these tips and if you’d like to talk to one of the team for more information about a resend programme for your campaign, get in contact.