Good or bad idea? Resend email to unopened

[Huihsing_Kiang3]

Hi Marketo gurus,

I'd like to get your thoughts about resending the same email to those have not opened the same email. One of my internal clients is the big fan of resending emails to unopened. Based on the data collected, I believe the 2nd email usually results in much lower opens/clicks but much higher unsub rate. I'm about to have a good talk.

What will you tell your internal clients? Or if there is any trick that can make this resend emails performing better?

Thanks a lot and happy Thanksgiving!

Huihsing

[Grégoire_Miche2]

It's a quite dangerous path to follow, as the "Open" flag is quite unreliable.

People who opened the email without downloading images will be seen as unopened. On the other end, most of antivirus software will download the images, and flag the email as opened in Marketo, even if the person has not opened the email.

So you end up with false positives and false negatives and you have no way to really know how many of them you have.

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2]

And BTW, there are more and more trouble with clicks as well, because anti-phishing systems clicks the links in the emails...

-Greg

[Kevin_McMahon1]

I wasn't aware that opens and clicks were so unreliable. Thanks for the insight Grégoire Michel​.

As for us, in certain circumstances we will send to people who did not open the first email, but we always change up the content slightly in second email so it's not the exact same.

[Betsy_Landon1]

Yes! This is killing me. There are two companies I had to omit from all alerts and interesting moments, because their anti-phishing tool is clicking all the links and causing a deluge of alerts and bogus interesting moments.

[Huihsing_Kiang3]

Thanks. So how do you deal with this kind of request? I assume you do not resend the emails to unopened?

[Dan_Stevens_]

Often times, this turns into conversation where we educate the field on email best practices and the risk associated with this type of request (especially - as Greg mentions - given the unreliability of knowing whether a recipient opened/clicked (or vice-versa) an email.  This can also tarnish your sender score if many mark this as spam (which is very easy to do these days on mobile - especially on iOS).  In other words, do whatever you can to discourage this type of activity.

[Alex_Greger2]

I would also recommend tracking and keep an eye on those that do not engage overtime and ensure you have a plan to re-engage with them or suppress them from future communications pending on the record. Those un-engaged records that now received two emails can hurt your sending reputation over time.  Continuously sending emails to those not engaged could inhibit future emails from hitting the inbox or even get you blacklisted.

I would recommend having a discussion with your business lines and ensure they understand that re-sending to those not engaged could affect other business line communications as well as their own in the future.

[Huihsing_Kiang3]

Thanks all. These are all very helpful.

[Betsy_Landon1]

When promoting a webinar, I only exclude the registration list for all the reasons mentioned. Each email still increases registration. For content promotion, I will resend to the unopened depending on how successful the first blast was. I wait 2-4 weeks before the next blast. This all depends on the unsubscribe rate. If it's really good and relevant content, people usually don't mind.