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Should I resend my email?: How to decide

Last updated: June 23, 2023

You spent hours planning your latest email, only for it to underperform. With so much at stake, you might be tempted to take another shot at your campaign and resend it the next day. 

But if it’s not backed by solid strategy, a second send can just as easily annoy your audience and hurt your deliverability.  

Should you resend your email? As with most topics in email marketing, the best decision depends on the context of your audience, your email type and your overall marketing goals, as well as what’s possible with your marketing software.  

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In this post, we’ll break down the pros and cons of a second send, discuss when it makes sense to resend an email, and present alternatives to resending.  

What are the benefits of resending an email?   

Resending an email increases the likelihood that you’ll engage any one person in your audience. With email becoming more and more popular, it’s possible that your audience really didn’t see it the first time. That’s especially true if you’re still trying to figure out what day of the week to send your emails. Resending gives those people another chance to open and engage with your message.    

Numbers aside, resending an email can also increase the ROI of all the work you put into writing copy, designing the layout, segmenting your audience, etc. Done thoughtfully (and selectively), second sends allow you to achieve more with less.  

What are the risks of resending an email?  

Resending an email can engage recipients that otherwise wouldn’t have seen your message. But a second send can just easily push your audience away. Email marketers already run the risk of appearing spammy, so resending the same message too many times can result in more complaints, unsubscribes and even deliverability issues. 

And even if your audience doesn’t actively ignore the second send? With the average knowledge worker receiving 100+ emails a day, there’s a good chance they won’t see that one either. Regardless of why they don’t open or click, their inaction still hurts your overall engagement numbers and, in turn, your deliverability.  

TLDR: If you’re going to resend your emails, be smart about it. Next, we’ll tell you when you should and shouldn’t send your email twice. 

When should you consider a second send?   

If you’re sending something with tangible value: If you’re demanding your audience’s time, again, your email needs to give them commensurate value. So if your email has an event invitation, research-heavy eBook or exclusive access to discounts, you can probably get away with a second send. (A caveat, though: Think long and honestly about the tangible value you’re giving your audience before committing to another send.)

If you’re testing an element of your email: The primary goal of any resend is to improve upon the first email’s performance. So if you’re using it to test a particular design or copy tweak, a second send can help you identify what works, nix what doesn’t, and replicate it in the future.  

No matter whether the test “succeeds” or “fails,” your recipients still win as long as you apply any learnings to improve your emails going forward. (Note: Resends shouldn’t replace A/B testing — use both these tactics in tandem.)  

When shouldn’t you resend an email?   

You’re trying to juice your open rates. Besides the obvious, that open rates aren’t as predictive of long-term email success as they used to be, chasing vanity metrics incentivizes you to make decisions that act against your best interests as a marketer — converting your audience for the long term.  

You’re following “best practice” instead of your individual audience metrics: Benchmark calculators and industry-wide best practices are incredibly valuable ways to measure what works for the average use case. They make a great starting point for evaluating your email strategy – but their recommendations are based on aggregates of billions of users. What’s best for the whole may not work for your audience.  

The takeaway: Don’t resend your emails because someone said it’s best practice. Take this advice as a guide, but also account for your own list characteristics. When you’ve increased sending frequency in the past, how has your audience responded? What send dates and times tend to result in better engagement? Are there specific audience segments that are more or less interested in the topic of your email? Dig into your own data before resending your email.  

Considerations for resending an email  

What (if anything) should you change? 

Use your second send as an experiment to see where you can improve your emails. It could be a broken or unappealing design that turned people off of your first message, but you won’t know for sure until you run a test of your audience.  

Consider running an A/B test in your first campaign, then using the winning email for your second send. So if you’re testing a red or black CTA button, and the former outperforms the latter for your first campaign, your second send should only include the red CTA button.  

Note: On Omeda, you can run A/B tests on subject lines, “from” names, body copy, CTA buttons, design layouts and more.   

Who should (and shouldn’t) receive the resent email? 

First things first, suppress anyone that unsubscribed or marked your email as spam.  

From there, consider the context of your email. Consider sending the second email only to a certain segment if your email is related to a specific part of your product or service. For instance, if you’re sending an eBook related to your manufacturing publication, you might send the second email of your campaign only to subscribers that have expressed interest in previous manufacturing content.  

On Omeda, you can create this segment using multiple filters: You could see whether someone has opened and clicked on your newsletter about manufacturing, whether they’ve interacted with similar content on your website, clicked a related display ad, etc.  

Should you resend all your email campaigns? 

A second send can yield more engagements and conversions, but only in specific contexts. For instance, resending your newsletter might net you new readers, but audiences might ignore your second promotional email.    

While resends can work in the right situation, they definitely shouldn’t be standard practice for every email you send. 

How long should you wait to resend an email? 

Wait 2-4 days before your second send. Sending within 48 hours seems spammy, but wait too long to resend and your content could become outdated.  

What are some alternatives to resending an email?   

Depending on your campaign and/or audience dynamic, it might not make sense to resend your email. Instead, get more out of your first send with these tactics:  

Segment your audience: Does your audience have many different niches and subgroups? (We bet yes.) Rather than send and resend niche emails to your full audience, look to segment your audience into different demographic, behavior-based and product-related groups. So no matter how many individual emails you send each segment, you’re maximizing your potential with each one.   

Personalize your emails with dynamic content: Segmentation allows you to send different emails to different groups within your audience. But that doesn’t account for differences between groups. Maybe you’re sending a newsletter to everyone that has expressed interest in financial topics. You want to promote your related magazine to this audience, but only to people that haven’t already subscribed.

With dynamic content, you can serve different messages, ads, etc., to each of these audiences — all within one campaign. This allows you to tailor content on an individual rather than a group level — and ultimately drive more conversions.  On Omeda, you can easily query your audience’s website activity, past purchase and download history, etc. Then you can personalize your content to subgroups within your email list.   

Win back subscribers with re-engagement campaigns: As mentioned, sometimes people really do just forget to open your emails. Rather than resend individual emails, periodically run a re-engagement campaign to keep your audience invested in your content (and protect your deliverability).

Conduct A/B testing: Running an A/B test allows you to test a new design or copy element within one campaign, rather than sending each email to both audiences and potentially annoying your audience. (Note: Sending each test message simultaneously also eliminates the confounding variables of send date and time from your experiment, so any performance lift can be attributed to the element you’re testing.) 

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