The danger of automatic resends

A popular tactic for increasing your email open rates is “automatic resends.”

This isn’t a bad idea at all.

However it can cause you to miss the biggest opportunities in your email list.

With an automatic resend, you create a segment of your list that didn’t open a specific email, and then resend them the same email, usually with a different subject line.

The idea here is that you’ll reach more people without “bugging” the people who read your message the first time.

A lot of the popular email tools like MailChimp and Drip offer a feature like this.

And it does work to increase your opens.

In my experience, if the original email got a 20% open rate, the resend might get an additional 8-10% of subscribers to open.

Nothing wrong with that.

The danger here is in the mindset that the automatic resend feature fosters.

You’re sending twice as much email to the people who AREN’T opening your messages to begin with.

This is exactly backwards.

I did an experiment recently that demonstrates this.

Details to come.