So, you’ve carefully crafted an attractive and engaging email, rich in vibrant images, highly relevant text, and thoughtfully-placed calls to action. Great job! Your subscribers are going to love it—assuming that they ever get the chance to see it, that is. 

Because sadly, the harsh reality is that only 18% of promotional eCommerce emails are ever opened, leaving a staggering 82% of your hard-earned emails forever wasted, consigned to the trash can of internet history. This is terrible news for your email marketing ROI!

Happily, there are ways to mitigate this situation, with the easiest and most effective method being remailing. Just resending your email campaigns in the right manner and at the right time can boost those open rates by up to 30%—a simple yet powerful addition to your email marketing arsenal. 

Sounds great, doesn’t it? But wait, before you start bombarding your subscribers with remails for easy gains, there are a few things to consider first. In this article, we’ll look at some common questions that arise around remailing, as well as some situations when it’s not a good solution at all. 

Intrigued? Excellent! So let’s go ahead and learn how to easily and effectively improve your email ROI with remailing. 

Remailing: What It Is and How It Works

Email service providers usually have an automated email remailing feature. Essentially it means that if an email hasn’t been opened within a predetermined period, it is sent again without any intervention from the marketer, giving the campaign an automatic boost.

Emails are usually opened within the first 48 hours of sending. Therefore we recommend waiting at least two days before re-engaging with subscribers while observing the following best practices:

• Use a different subject line. Mix it up and differentiate from your original email—if it was general, make it specific and actionable. If there were no emojis, throw a couple in there. If it was text-heavy, add a couple of numbers (perhaps even offer a discount) to capture your customers’ attention. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and again and expecting a different result, let’s keep it sane and try a different subject line on this one. 
  

• Don’t remail more than once. If a subscriber ignores your email a second time, it’s time to get the message and move on—there is clearly no interest here. 
  

• Measure the results of your remailing efforts separately to your original campaign emails. Your audience is different now, you have removed your most engaged subscribers and are targeting only those that require an extra nudge. Your results will reflect this. On average, remailing open rates are about half of those from the original campaign. Still, this boost is a welcome addition to your overall campaign numbers.
• Lastly, consider improving the email deliverability rate by implementing an email verifier and removing invalid and non-existent email addresses from your list. To build this list, you can utilize a LinkedIn email finder or other tools.
  

3 Reasons to Consider Remailing 

1. With 82% of emails going unopened, any inroads you can make into improving this statistic is going to do wonders for your ROI. The reasons your emails go unopened can be simple: either your subject line isn’t grabbing enough attention, or it just got lost among a bunch of other, more urgent emails. Remailing can go a long way toward rectifying these situations! However, it can also be possible that subscribers have simply lost interest in your brand over time. For this, you can read up on lapsed subscribers.
   

2. Remailing is one of the best and most efficient uses of time—with just a single change of subject line, you can boost your campaign’s performance with impressive numbers! Check out the results of the brand that uses remailing.

3. You’ll see a growth in sales! Not only clicks and opens benefit from remailing, as the chart above shows, but these metrics also translate into orders and sales. For the price of a tweaked subject line, remailing offers tangible results to your bottom line. 
   

When to Use Remailing 

However tempting this simple, yet effective tactic might be, it’s important not to overdo it. Remailing is ideal in situations like:

• New product notifications
• “Last Chance” reminders for things like discounts or sales
• Popular products coming back in stock
• Other messages that you’d consider to be important for your subscribers to hear
  

But try to avoid remailing if you find yourself in one of the following situations: 

• Sending minor updates, newsletters or other ‘non-essential’ emails
• Holding flash sales or sending other time-sensitive correspondence—this is better done with more urgent-friendly channels like SMS. 
• If you’re sending emails daily. Too many emails can quickly overwhelm and irritate a subscriber, increasing your unsubscribe and spam rates. Know your limits, and choose your battles carefully. 
• Have unengaged contacts. Keep your email list clean of unengaged contacts–repeatedly remailing them and hoping to wake the dead is not only ineffective, but it can harm your sender’s reputation, too.   
  

Recycling Vs Remailing

Remailing involves sending the same content again, with the only difference being in the subject line. For some, this can be problematic—sending the same thing twice could be taken as lazy or boring. If this is you, you could consider tweaking your content so it retains the same essence but is modified to better suit your less engaged subscribers, either with new visuals or more targeted content. 

Recycling is different from remailing but it can also save you time, you can adapt the body of one email to a variety of different campaigns. However, you can be comfortable with the concept of remailing–all you are doing is giving your emails a second chance to be seen. 
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Final Thoughts

The numbers don’t lie, remailing works. Sure, as a strategy it is not the most sophisticated–there are other things that you can try, including the segmentation of your audience and omnichannel messaging, which offer a level of personalization that’s sure to engage your subscribers and have them happily and regularly receiving your messages.

Yet for its simplicity and pure, bang-for-buck effectiveness, automated remailing is an easy and essential method for increasing email ROI that shouldn’t be missed.    

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‍About the Author:
Karolina is a writer, content marketer and email enthusiast at Omnisend. When she’s not writing articles, you can find her in the woods challenging herself in hiking boots or off-roading her bike.