Once your team has put effort and energy into an important email campaign, it’s disappointing not to see the results you were hoping for. However, it’s often worth giving your message a second chance – especially as so many factors go into why someone may or may not open a new email or newsletter.
In this article, we’ll share how resending emails may help you increase engagement, along with tips for strategically following up on unopened emails. We’ll also cover instructions on how to resend an email in Gmail and Outlook.
Why you should resend emails
A lot of work goes into email design, writing and tracking – especially when you’ve put in the effort to personalize it.
There are many reasons why people don’t see your message, so it’s worth reconnecting with anyone who may have missed out because they were busy or the email got buried, lost or landed in the wrong folder.
When considering why you might resend emails, think about your own inbox and all the reasons you might not open an email, even if it’s relevant to you.
For example, you may receive an interesting email at a time of day when you’re busy with something else. Alternatively, perhaps the email subject line doesn’t clearly match the content inside, and the format doesn’t intrigue you enough to open it.
Even with relevant information from companies we love, emails can easily get lost. Maybe your email open rates are low because recipients save it to read later but forget to do so.
Resending emails allows your team to A/B test elements like:
Subject lines
Messaging
CTAs
Sending times
From this data, you can determine whether your audience truly isn’t interested in your emails (perhaps certain types, like sales emails vs. educational emails) or if you simply need to tweak certain elements to re-engage them.
How to resend email campaigns that get opened
Depending on your email marketing strategy, there are many approaches you can take to optimize your emails and improve open rates.
Here are a few ideas for updating your email templates, formats, designs or content in order to improve deliverability, expand reach and increase your conversion rate.
1. Consider behavioral segmentation
People likely won’t open emails if they don’t feel relevant.
Segmenting your audience by behavior and demographics when you collect email addresses is incredibly important to ensure you send personalized and thoughtful messages. Behavioral segmentation can be especially powerful when combined with subject line testing and marketing flows.
Here’s how this might look in practice.
Let’s say the subject line of your original email was about a sale, offering up to 50% off all items. It sounds like a great deal, so your team may wonder why it didn’t generate a higher open rate.
If you dig into your customer metrics, you may find that there are two large segments of customers that respond to different types of incentives.
One segment tends to click mainly on scarcity language (e.g., “Only five items left!”), and another is interested in customer reviews (e.g., “Check out our item with 1k+ five-star reviews.”).
Consider testing new subject lines that cater specifically to these behaviors instead of assuming a big sale will incentivize everyone.
2. A/B test your changes
Unless it has bounced due to an incorrect email address or server error, you never want to reuse and resend an email exactly as it was without changing anything.
Doing so will annoy your audience and potentially make them unsubscribe from your mailing list. Sometimes, something seemingly small (like a subject line or a tweaked CTA) can make all the difference.
Here are some email components to consider A/B testing.
Subject lines
A tailored subject line will make or break newsletter open rates. For example, a Klenty study found that using a recipient’s first name in the subject line increased the average open rate to 39%.
If engagement or conversions aren’t high the first time, consider how you can get non-clickers interested in your email a second time by using personalized subject lines.
A strategy like this will work best in tandem with behavioral segmentation. What can you say in just a handful of words to appeal to a specific target audience’s motivations or behaviors?
Consider testing emojis, shorter vs. longer subject lines and language that aligns with unique behaviors and triggers.
CTAs
Maybe your email open rate was great, but you were surprised by a lack of conversions. Consider A/B testing new message CTAs, including email copywriting like “Buy now” and “Learn more” or visual changes like making the CTA button bigger or bolder.
A simple and intuitive user experience can be the difference between a reader completing an action or navigating away.
Messaging
Most brands have several messaging pillars.
For example, a clothing company may talk about its sustainable supply chain, giveback model and fashion-forward styling. If this company sends a message to its entire email list highlighting a sustainable supply chain above all else, more than half of its audience may not be interested.
To combat this, they could consider segmenting out those who tend to click on fashion-forward email content and tweaking the messaging to fit their interests. Then, segment their email list to exclude those who engaged with the sustainable supply chain email.
Now, each segment receives an email newsletter tailored specifically to their interests, boosting interest and engagement.
Send times
Maybe you sent your initial email message first thing on a Monday morning when people are drowning in their post-weekend inbox. Or on a Friday afternoon when everyone is trying to wrap up the week.
Send times impact open rates and engagement, so optimize what works best for your audience by testing the windows of time in which you click send. For example, you may find that a mid-week evening works best when people are more likely to be scrolling through their phones.
Sender name
Who your email is coming from can impact how many people open it. A message from your founder’s email account, for example, may feel more personalized and worth opening than general promotional emails.
3. Reach your audience in new ways
Sometimes, the notifications in our email clients’ inboxes become overwhelming, which is where other marketing channels can be helpful.
For example, you can follow up emails to non-openers with SMS to test whether they actually weren’t interested in your email or prefer other means of communication.
Using multiple channels in your outreach efforts gives you more opportunities to reach your target audience or inactive subscribers. These include:
Phone calls
Social media platforms (e.g., LinkedIn and X, formerly Twitter)
In-app messaging
On-site notifications
Before you click the send button, consider leveraging ads to get your message in front of your audience via social media. If someone hasn’t opened their Gmail or Microsoft Outlook account recently, they might click on the same CTA if they noticed it in an ad on LinkedIn or Facebook.
When you should resend an email
There’s a difference between thoughtfully and strategically resending an email and spamming your audience.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when considering when (and whether) to resend an email:
Wait at least a few days before resending an email. People sometimes don’t even open emails they’re very interested in reading, so give your audience two to four days to open the first email before you compose the next.
Think about your number of recently sent emails. Perhaps your low open rate is because your sent items list has been pretty high lately, or you haven’t emailed in a long time. Your personal email marketing metrics can help you figure out how frequently your old and new recipients want to hear from you.
Don’t resend every single email campaign. Only resend emails if you have a hypothesis (and ideally tested it) as to why it wasn’t successful and what you think (or are told via data) will make it better.
Leverage your email marketing benchmarks. Determine whether a campaign or message is worth resending with existing data (such as bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, unique opens and industry average click-through rates or CTR). If a campaign falls within expected or ideal outcomes, it’s not worth re-filling your sent folder.
Now you know when to send an email and why, let’s look at how to do that with two popular tools.
How to resend an email in Outlook
If you’re using Microsoft Outlook as a provider to manage email campaigns, it has a dedicated “resend command”. However, the process slightly differs depending on whether you’re a Windows, Mac or Outlook.com user.
Windows
Open your Outlook app, navigate to your Sent Items folder and find the email you want to resend.
In the Move group of the Message tab, click “Actions” (the open envelope icon with a page behind it) and then “Resend This Message”.
When the new message pops up, you have a few options. You can:
Resend the email to everyone without making any changes
Remove email addresses, attachments or message contents
Add new email addresses, attachments or message contents
Once you’re happy with the address list and content, click “Send”.
Outlook for Mac
Open the Outlook for Mac app and navigate to your Sent folder. Right-click the email you want to resend and select “Resend” from the drop-down menu.
In the following window, make any desired changes to your address list and email contents. When you’re happy, click “Send”.
Outlook.com
Outlook’s web browser doesn’t have the same “resend command” as the apps. However, you can use “Forward” for the same purpose.
Open Outlook.com and find the email you want to resend in your Sent Items. Right-click the message, select “Forward” and choose the recipients.
In the subject line, delete the beginning of the text that says “Fw:” so it looks like a new message and update the main body with any changes.
How to resend an email in Gmail
Resending an email in Gmail involves a few more steps than Outlook because there is no dedicated “resend” command.
Here, you can copy and paste the previous email into a new one or reply or forward it after making some changes.
Compose a new email
Head to your Gmail account and find the email in your Sent folder. Open it, select all the text you want to resend and right-click to “Copy” it. (You can also use keyboard shortcuts like “Ctrl+C” on a PC or “Command+C” on a Mac.)
Click the “Compose” button on the left to open a new email. Right-click to “Paste” in your content (“Ctrl+V” or “Command+V”), edit any updated changes and then add your recipients.
Write a new subject line or keep the original with a “Re:” at the beginning, then click “Send”.
Reply or forward
You can also reply or forward an email in Gmail to resend it.
Start in your Sent folder and open the email you want to resend. At the bottom, you’ll see the option to “Reply” or “Forward”.
If your message has attachments, choose “Forward” to retain them. If it doesn’t, you can choose either option.
Delete the top lines showing the previous send address, date, subject line and recipient. After that, update the message’s content if needed.
When you’re ready, add a new subject line and recipients and click “Send” to resend your email.
Final thoughts
When done well, resending emails is a great way to learn more about your audience and increase engagement.
Whether you’re looking to increase newsletter open rates or sales numbers, there are a lot of tests you can do and tutorials you can follow to find the best way to reach your audience.
