Resending Emails in Business: Is It Worth Using?

Why resend emails

81% of recipients unsubscribe from brands that send emails too often. So, should you resend the email campaign that was ignored the first time? Although your concern is justified, resending emails has its benefits. Here are some to consider: 

• It can boost your conversion rates. Some people need to be told twice to take action. Who knows, maybe there are people like this among your subscribers.
• Your engagement rates can increase. What if your recipient simply overlooked your email in their cluttered inbox? Resending emails can increase your chances of being noticed, which means boosting your open rates and CTR.
• You get a second chance by changing your subject line. Some subscribers may have missed your email the first time because its subject line wasn’t enticing enough. Resending your email, you can upgrade it to be more eye-catching.

How to resend emails

Resending emails isn’t a long or complicated process. Here’s how to resend your emails in Selzy.

1. Select the email campaign you want to resend from the Campaigns history page or your dashboard.

2. Click the circular arrow icon to start resending.

3. In the pop-up window, set up the new subject line and sending time — now or later.

Key principles when resending emails

Resending emails doesn’t require any special skills or complicated schemes. However, here are some principles to follow if you want to make the most of resending emails.

Wait a few days

Resending emails too soon might annoy your recipients. If one sees a familiar subject line that they just saw in the inbox, they’ll treat your email as spam or even unsubscribe from your newsletter. 

You can also analyze your previous email campaigns to identify when exactly recipients open your emails. Based on this information, you can find the best time to send an email again. 

In Selzy, you can do it in the Recipient behavior tab. Here’s what it looks like:

For example, the campaign above got most, although not all of its opens during the day it was sent. It was also sent on a Friday, so resending it at the beginning of the next work week is a reasonable solution.

Do not resend all emails

Although resending emails is a common marketing practice, you shouldn’t do it with every email campaign or just too often. If you resend too many emails, your subscribers will get annoyed. Here are some emails worth resending:

• Valuable offers. These can be special deals, offers, freebies, or other campaigns with higher chances of opening — think of emails with the highest potential value.
• Limited offers. In this case, you can resend the email campaign a day away from the deadline to create urgency. It will work even better if you add a countdown timer GIF to the email.
• Important messages. Crucial policy or pricing updates, correction emails, and other messages that need an outreach as wide as possible are worth resending — in this case, it’s customer care, not a marketing trick.

Consider changing the subject line

The subject line is the first thing that your recipient sees in their inbox. Based on their impression of it, they decide whether to open your email or not. So, changing your subject line can increase your chances of success with resending emails. Moreover, a subscriber might recognize the subject line in their inbox if you don’t change it — this may worsen your image in the eyes of your contact base.

Don’t know how to “change the subject”, so to speak? Here are some examples for your inspiration:

Automate the resending process

Automating processes, resending included, saves your time and mental energy for more important things like strategic thinking. Selzy’s updated campaign flow allows you to set up the resending date so you don’t have to do it manually.

In the Review and finish part of the campaign flow, find the Email Schedule settings, and select the Resend to those who have not opened checkbox. Then, you’ll be able to customize the resending settings, including the new subject line.

Don’t resend emails more than once

There is a difference between resent emails and follow-up emails. Different sources suggest sending up to 5 follow-ups for one message. However, this does not apply to resending. Why so?

Each follow-up email is a different message where you try to find the right approach to a prospect who doesn’t reach out to you. You appeal to different pain points, describe different advantages of your product or service, and provide success stories. It’s not the case for resent emails — you’re just copy-pasting the same message because it wasn’t opened the first time. So, if you keep resending identical emails over and over, you’ll end up with spam reports and unsubscribes.

What to do if resending emails is ineffective

There is no 100% guarantee resending emails will be successful and effective. However, we do have some tips for you — consider using them to make the most of resending email campaigns.

Conduct A/B tests

A/B testing for the resending emails can help you identify your strong and weak points. It can also help you check out if resending works for your audience — you can split the contact list into two groups and resend your campaign to one of them. 

Alternatively, you can make two different subject line versions to see which one performs better. Here are possible subject line variables you can test while resending email campaigns:

• Length. Try both short and long subject lines to see what resonates with your audience better.
• Personalization elements. You can send one recipient group a subject line with their name in it.
• Emojis. According to our emoji research, 60% of subject lines with emojis perform better than the ones without them. So, why not check out if your email campaign is in the remaining 40%?

After you perform the resending email testing, check the results. The most obvious thing to do here is to pay attention to email open rates. Although open rates are not necessarily the reflection of your email campaign success, they are still worth working on. You can use them as an A/B testing metric to identify the best subject line version. Email opens also demonstrate how many people received your information and increase conversion odds.

Analyze responses

If you don’t understand what you’re doing wrong, ask your subscribers directly. You may create a survey or ask them to reply to your email with their feedback. To gather as many responses as possible, try making your surveys easy to navigate. You can make a multiple-choice questionnaire or a sliding scale. 

Asking for feedback will help you avoid common email mistakes like consistently sending irrelevant content. It’s also an opportunity to understand your audience better, enhance your email marketing campaigns — and, of course, learn how your subscribers really perceive email resending.

React to negativity

As beneficial as resending emails is, some of your subscribers may react negatively to them. Some leave negative reviews, while others reply directly to your emails. To keep a warm relationship with your customers, it is important to react to negativity. Here’s what you can do to achieve the best results:

• Show that you care. Don’t reply to negativity with more negativity. Instead, show your customers that you acknowledge them and understand their disappointment.
• Identify the problem. It is important to understand the reason behind their frustration to react accordingly. Are they mad because you send your emails too often or are your emails not relevant?
• Propose solutions. You can suggest your subscribers adjust their email preferences or assure them that you are going to improve your approach.

What results can you expect from email resending?

So, you already know that resending emails increases engagement but to what extent? Here’s an example we discussed in FWD: by Selzy.

In April 2024, we ran the first-ever promotional campaign for FWD: by Selzy subscribers. However, we ended up sending the wrong discount code, so we sent a correction email as a hotfix. Thanks to resending, the total open rate of this campaign reached a whopping 73%.

Here are some numbers to put that into perspective:

• The correction email was sent to a segment that involved 3,344 subscribers affected by the mishap.
• 1,811 recipients (54%) opened the first email.
• We resent the email to 1,762 subscribers who didn’t open it the first time — 616 subscribers opened the second email.
• So, if we didn’t resend the email, we’d get 29% fewer email opens. 

Will you achieve results like this? It heavily depends on many factors. If you want to maximize the results of your email resends, experiment and evaluate the data. You may want to take campaign type, sending and resending days of week and time of day, subject lines, and other factors into account. However, this case demonstrates how powerful resending emails can be — if applied to the right emails at the right time.

Final thoughts

Resending emails is a strategy worth giving a try. It gives a second chance to the campaigns you’ve spent time and effort on to boost your open, conversion, and engagement rates.

To make sure your emails don’t end up unopened in your recipient’s inbox, do the following:

• Wait a few days after sending the first email.
• Carefully choose campaigns with high resending potential — we suggest campaigns with limited-time offers, extremely valuable offers, or important information.
• Change your subject line so it’s more enticing.
• Automate the resending process so you don’t have to resend every campaign manually.
• Only resend emails once — these are not follow-up emails, so you don’t need to do it several times.