How newsletter resends can increase email opens and reach more readers

There’s a lot of work that can go into a newsletter in a newsroom.

• Creating subject lines and A/B testing them

• Writing a great introduction

• Choosing the headlines to feature

• Working on a narrative format for the different content containers

But once you send a newsletter, that doesn’t have to be the end of it. Resending it to people who didn’t open it the first time can be a smart strategy, especially for niche newsletters where the content still has value a day or two later.

I’m going to spend some time in today’s newsletter talking about resends, why they work and how to do them well.

There’s a lot of data that says this works

Want proof that this is a good strategy? Just look at a few studies that support the idea:

• Mailchimp analyzed 1,300 campaigns and said the average open rate was about 27%. When those campaigns were resent to people who hadn’t opened the first newsletter, the resend helped them reach another 8.7% of their email list.

• MailerLite has said that its data shows resending a campaign can generate a significant amount of more opens. It gave a specific example where one webinar invitation had a 14% initial open rate. After a resend, the total open rate increased to more than 23%.

Personally, I can tell you that we have put this strategy in place for a handful of clients in the last three months, and they are all seeing an additional 10-15 percentage points in open rate on their second send.

This doesn’t work well for every newsletter

I don’t think this is a good strategy for a publisher that sends out a daily newsletter. You would really be bombarding your audience with emails and potentially triggering unsubscribes.

But this really does work well for more niche-oriented newsletters, like the following:

• Weekend and things-to-do newsletters
• Weekly roundups of your most popular content
• Seasonal guides (like best fall festivals)
• Dining, education, parenting or other evergreen newsletters
• Business-oriented niche newsletters (real estate, manufacturing)
• Event and registration emails
• Important subscriber messages

The key is to make sure the content is still relevant and timely. So if you decide to resend your things-to-do newsletter, just make sure that someone can still attend the events at the time they receive it.

5 best practices worth trying out

There are a few basics that I think are worth pointing out when it comes to executing this:

• Generally, send somewhere between 24 and 48 hours after you send the first newsletter.

• It’s completely fine to have the resends go out on a weekend. You might be surprised by the engagement that you get.

• Consider changing the subject line. It doesn’t have to be totally different from the original, but a different approach may help keep a reader from scrolling by it.

• I’m a big proponent of sending newsletters just to those who have opened one in the last three months and putting non-openers into a separate re-engagement campaign. This means that these resend emails should just go to those who have engaged with your newsletter in the last three months.

• Look at how many additional opens and clicks you get, how much traffic the resend drives to your site and whether you see any increase in unsubscribes. You want to know what that second send is actually adding.

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