When you send marketing emails, it’s usual that most people won’t open them.

For business-to-business marketing emails, open rates are typically between 10% and 30%. Open rates depend heavily on the quality of your list and the subject line but are unlikely to ever be more than 50%.

So any way of getting more people to open your marketing emails is useful. One simple trick you could try is simply re-sending an email with a different subject line.

Let’s say you sent an email with the subject, Invitation to a free event on Cloud Accounting. And let’s imagine that 24% of your database of 1200 contacts opened it. Most firms consider that campaign over and done with.

But why not send the same email one week later, this time changing the subject to Free Event: How Cloud Accounting can boost your business? You would only send this to the 912 people who didn’t open the original email.

This will achieve two things:

  1. Some people will have ignored your first email. Perhaps they were busy or it just came at a bad time. This time, they might open it
  2. People react in different ways to subject lines. Changing the subject could activate some people who ignored the first one

Typically, the open rate for your second email will be lower, maybe by as much as 50%. That doesn’t matter. Using our example, even if the open rate is 50% lower it’s still another 109 people who opened your email.

Some would advocate against sending an email twice. The argument is you risk subscribers thinking you’re ‘spamming’ them. I disagree – if they didn’t open the first email, they haven’t read it. And with a new subject line, it’s effectively a different email.

Plus, most people have very short memories. So unless you’re doing this every week, it’s unlikely to annoy anyone.

Ultimately, you know your database and have to judge whether they’d react badly.

But many marketers, including the team at BizInk use this tactic to squeeze every bit of effectiveness out of a marketing campaign.


Want to improve you email marketing results? BizInk can help with email content, software and strategy. Drop us a line to find out more.