Are you missing a key step to email marketing success?
You’re distracted. Yes, you have work to do, but it’s a beautiful day and you want to be outside. Or your personal to-do list is out of control and you just need some time to tackle it. Maybe you simply want to work a little less hard. That’s fair, right?
Not only fair, but smart. With systematic processes, you can streamline your marketing efforts, reducing the hurdles associated with content publication and helping to maintain marketing momentum. One such process can increase your email open rates by 50% without a lot of additional effort.
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Whether you are disciplined about maintaining a regular emailing cadence or struggle to publish occasionally, you probably (hopefully) follow a predictable series of steps for each marketing email:
- Utilize a mobile-responsive template that echoes your brand
- Wordsmith and refine to come up with the best subject lines
- Include links to your website and active social media profiles
- Research the optimal day and time to reach your target audience
- Cater your content to your subscriber preferences
- Repurpose content from (or to) your blog or website
- Proofread, preview and send test emails to avoid errors
- Include social sharing links to encourage readers to share
- Most importantly, offer content that’s useful, engaging and memorable
The above nine steps are important to successful email marketing. But there’s one more that’s often missed.
The key step that you probably aren’t doing: Re-mail.
Haven’t there been times (like daily, perhaps?!) that you delete an email because your in-box is overwhelming? One that you might be interested in reading — but just not right now? Most of us need an occasional reminder to attend to all the to-do’s in our lives.
There’s no rule that says you can’t re-send the email to those who didn’t open it.
One of the benefits of using an email marketing service are the metrics, including opens and non-opens. By capitalizing on this data, you create an opportunity to reach those people who didn’t open your email the first time … perhaps because when the email arrived, it just wasn’t a good time.
Don’t annoy.
Before you embark on this new strategy, take a deep breath. Remember that you want to help — not irritate — your potential customers. While open rates tend to be highest on the first couple of days after mailing, it may take some recipients a week or more to open your email. Wait until your opens have dwindled before re-mailing to subscribers who did not open the initial email.
Make sure to change the date on the email and update any time-sensitive information to be certain the content is still relevant. Create a new list (we use the name of the original email, preceded by “non-opens”), revise the subject line and mail at a different time of day and day of the week.
Our experience is that the open rate on re-mails is about half of that of the original email. There’s very little additional work involved, and if your results are similar to ours, you’ll be reaching a lot more people with a little bit of effort.
And best of all? You’ll actually have time to take the dog for a hike or enjoy a mid-day siesta.
Need a hand with your email marketing? Contact us.
This post was originally published in 2014 and has been updated for relevance and timeliness.
