At Copper we place a lot of emphasis on the donor experience and how the communications we send for our clients serve to uplift and engage supporters. Resend emails are one of the touchpoints we’re increasingly using to extend our email journeys and improve donor engagement.
What is a resend?
A resend email is exactly what it says it is – a resend of a previous email. Typically, we’ll send them to supporters that didn’t open the original first time around. This allows us to maximise our opportunity for engagement with those supporters who ignored or simply missed the first send.
Unopened emails don’t necessarily reflect a lack of interest from your supporters. 269 billion emails are sent every day so yours could have easily been buried under other emails in their inbox. Supporters may have forgotten about your email or it simply wasn’t a priority at the time. By reappearing in these supporters’ inbox a few days later, it may be less congested second time, you may remind them that they we’re going to open and read your email or, depending on the nature of the email, could emphasise the importance of their interaction. That said, supporters that consistently ignore your emails should perhaps be suppressed or put on a re-engagement journey.
Resend vs reminder emails
Resends are different from reminder emails. Allowing for small tweaks and optimisations, a resend is fundamentally the same email as its main version. Its main objective is to encourage additional opens and, hopefully, therefore clicks. A reminder email however is its own email with its own content. It serves to remind supporters of the campaign objective by reframing the previous ask or giving them a different proposition. Its main goal is to increase clicks and conversions. How and where you use them, either or both, will depend on the email series in question and what you’re looking to achieve.
When to use a resend email
Resend emails add most value when there’s an ask involved. We’ve used resends as part of appeal campaigns, alongside reminders for engagement pieces and in the context of general campaign asks. These touchpoints are chosen at specific stages to best impact the donor journey. Depending on the length of the journey in question, have your resend 2-7 days after the first broadcast to give supporters enough time to engage with it.
Do resend emails improve donor engagement?
Any interaction you see from a resend is supplementing your original email and can be considered additional engagement. Last year, our resend emails saw an average open rate of 17.5% and click rate of 3.59%. This is all engagement that would most likely not have happened were it not for these resends.
In terms of effectiveness (unique clicks / unique opens), resend emails convert as well or better than any other. Our resends saw an effective rate on par with and sometimes in excess of their respective main emails. This highlights the value of getting your emails in front of supporters again. Those that go ahead and open a resend click through at a similar or better rate to the main email.
Get in touch
Let us know if your charity could see the value of improving engagement with resend emails. We can advise you on the best placement for these additional touchpoints within your different email journeys to further uplift and engage your supporters.
Alex is a Digital Content Coordinator at Copper
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