With Valentine’s Day around the corner, I thought I’d share some ideas on how you can get a little more love for your email campaign by giving it a second chance.
Let’s say you sent off your email and the results aren’t what you expected. Since you’ve already put your time and effort into crafting your message – maybe it has a great offer or it’s a newsletter with helpful info – any additional opens you can get is a bonus without a lot of effort. Here are two scenerios where this is worth trying and a couple of techniques to help it work.
Scenario #1:
When you look at your email open rates broken down by email provider (please tell me you ARE doing this), you notice that one is pretty far off compared to the others. Example: Hotmail opens = 27%, Gmail = 33% and Yahoo = 12%. In this situation, why not try resending your campaign ONLY to Yahoo email addresses that didn’t open the first time?
Scenario #2:
You’re reviewing the open rate and although your content was relevant and helpful to your customers, your open rates are pretty far-off compared to previous campaigns.
First, let’s consider why people who want your information may not have opened your email. Maybe:
- The subject line didn’t appeal to them so they never opened it.
- They were on vacation and yours was included in the bulk delete they did upon their return.
- They saw it come in and intended to open it but it got buried before they remembered.
- It got delivered to their spam folder and they never saw it.
These are people who may be interested in a second opportunity to see your message so why not try resending to those that didn’t open.
But before you hit the send button for the second time, you first need to make some changes. Begin by changing your subject line. You might try:
- Adding personalization if you didn’t use it the first time.
- Use a different hook / highlight a different feature.
- Take a reminder approach: “In case you missed this – “
Next, target a different time to send your message:
- Change the time of day
- Change the day of the week
And finally, select your recipients. Using your analytics from your last email, create a database of people who didn’t open it. To be cautious, I would revise this list to include those people who didn’t open this email, but have opened previous emails from you.
Wait a week or so since your original email (or whatever your analytics define as the drop-off point for your opens) and then resend.
A few words of caution… if you have a bad email reputation or you are filling up your customers’ inboxes with info they don’t want, sending an email a second time around is going to make your spam complaints skyrocket.
This technique is best used cautiously and when you have a special message that warrants a second chance or you’ve identified an issue with a specific email provider.
