Most of the eCommerce email marketers I interact with measure success using direct response metrics -- opens, clicks, forwards, last-click revenue, ad revenue, etc.
A much more difficult, yet potentially more critical, success metric for your emails is whether or not they successfully trigger a dopamine response when your subscribers open.
Highly successful email channels are being built on only this idea.
Huckberry is probably the best example of this strategy. Mister Spoils is another. Direct response matters, but their real goal is to create a dopamine loop. When subscribers open an email from these brands, they are surprised, entertained, educated, or escape to a beautiful travel destination. The subscriber is psychologically rewarded for taking action (opening), and the loop conditions them to open next time, seeking the next reward. It doesn't matter if they click-through today's campaign because click-through is the loop's inevitable byproduct.
Subscribers may go through 100 of these loops before they buy anything, but they will eventually.
How are you rewarding your subscribers when they open your emails? And what kind of content could you curate that would initiate the loop?
I've got two other updates for you this week:
BIMI is a new email authentication protocol that is gaining mainstream adoption from major ISPs. The benefit of establishing a BIMI policy is that Brands and bulk senders who adhere to authentication best practices for SPF, DKIM, and DMARC can display their logo next to messages in the inbox. In short, BIMI will enable brands to generate additional brand impressions, even if subscribers don't open or click. The other exciting hypothesis is that displaying a verified logomark next to an unread email in the inbox would increase overall OR%.
The short answer is, "Yes", you should. Resends can be incrementally beneficial, but they should be employed thoughtfully to minimize the risk of negative outcomes.
Here's how we think about them:
1. Resend selectively. In other words, we only resend our best offers, best content, most exciting product launches, etc. How often you employ resends also depends on your overall sending frequency. In some cases, resends aren't necessary because velocity is already so high that the list will get fresh content in a day or two anyway. If you're sending a few times a month, resends can add a lot of incremental engagement for minimal effort.
2. Build the resend audience based on opens and clicks. Open pixel tracking is not 100% accurate, and there will be some subscribers who track as clicks but not opens.
3. Change/test the content. At a minimum, change the subject line. Even better, change up the design of the template. We also like to run the first send as a 50/50 split, and if we have a strong enough result, we'll send the winning subject line to everyone who didn't open the losing one and a different SL to the remainder.
4. Minimize reputation risk. Having a sunsetting policy in place will automatically prune inactive subscribers from the list every 3 months, 6 months, etc. The cadence of sunsetting is another nuanced topic that is really dependent on your customer lifecycle (consumable vs. gift vs. apparel, etc.). Your sunsetting policy should prune those inactive folks, but it has to make sense for your business.
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