The best way to reengage inactive contacts is repetition – within reason, of course. Resending emails to non-openers and sending win back emails are two simple ways that just plain work.

How many times do kids need to be reminded to put the dishes away? The answer is: “more than once”.

It’s the same with email opens. Often people won’t open your email the first time around. If you don’t remind them then all the hard work you put into getting subscribers and writing content won’t reach as many people as it could.

Use these two simple yet effective tactics to increase opens and overall list engagement.

Resend emails to non openers

When you send an email campaign most of the people in your audience won’t open your message. 

Some of them don’t care or they’re no longer interested but some simply missed your email: They could be off that day, in a long meeting, dealing with family issues or your email got lost in busy inboxes. They’re still interested but unless you resend your email to this group of non-openers they won’t have a chance to read your content.

Resending to non-openers is a very simple process. and a good way to reengage inactive contacts. Identify the non-openers for your email campaign, duplicate your email and send the duplicated email to the non-opener segment.

The resend should use a slightly different subject line: maybe the original didn’t pique their interest and the updated version will. Also, you should send the email at a different time than the original.

The additional opens that the resend generates far offsets contacts you lose due to unsubscribes in resend campaigns. This is analyzed in great detail from a post titled Get back to the top of the pile by Business 2 Community.

You can check out a step-by-step guide to resend email campaigns with Envoke, a Canadian email marketing service.

Reengage inactive contacts by sending win back emails

This is different from resending emails to non openers because the goal here is get inactive contacts back to the habit of interacting with your brand – not just to open a single email.

First, you need to identify inactive contacts who didn’t open or click emails in the past 3, 6 or 12 months or didn’t open or click any of your past X emails.

Then send these contacts a re-engagement email, which is also called a win-back email.

This message should explain the benefits of being part of your list and tell inactive contacts what they’re missing by not reading your emails. 

We decided not to write another “5 top ten win back emails” article, as there are hundreds out there, instead here’s an article called How to Win Subscribers Back: 5 Tips for Creating Effective Re-engagement Emails from Litmus. Litmus is an authority in everything email related; you’re in good hands with their advice.

Here’s how to send win back emails in Envoke, a Canadian bulk email platform with an emphasis on great support and compliance with Canadian legislation and data storage on servers in Canada.

Voila! Using these two simple tactics will improve engagements and increase open rates.

About Envoke

Envoke is an email marketing and communications platform for sending bulk emails. We’ve been around for 15 years and work with small and large organizations alike who value security, compliance, ease of use and support that actually cares. Get a free trial to test drive our software today. Not ready to start a trial account? Have a look at this page for a comparison between Envoke and Mailchimp to find out how we do things differently.