103 | Why You Shouldn't Resend Newsletters to Non-Openers

0:00 Hi there, welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman. I'm an herbalist and nutritionist, and in this podcast, I share little tips and tidbits that might be helpful for other practitioners. Today, I want to answer a question that was sent in, which is, does it make sense for me to resend my newsletter to people who didn't open it the first time? And I know most newsletter email service providers offer the option to do this. Usually it's just a click or two. It'll say, hey, do you want to resend this to people who didn't open it, etc. So they make it very easy to do this, which kind of implies that you should be doing it. So this question asker wanted to know, is that true? Should I actually be doing that? Does it make sense? Will I be bothering people?

0:40 How should I think about this as an option if you are using your newsletter as a marketing tool? So here's the deal. There was a time back in the day when it did make sense to resend newsletters if somebody hadn't seen them. This was in a time when inboxes were a little bit less cluttered than they are today. We had a little bit of a different approach to our inboxes, and times were perhaps a little bit simpler in some ways. These days, it probably doesn't make sense most of the time to resend your newsletter if somebody didn't open it. There's a couple of reasons why. I'll go through a couple of them. Before I do, let me just remind you that I am not an email marketing expert. I'm not an email marketing.

1:23 There may be more technical explanations for this, and I'm recording this in the middle of 2026. It's possible that the answer to this question will evolve and shift over the years. So in case you're listening to this in the future, go ahead and look it up for whatever moment of time you are in right now, because things change pretty rapidly over the years. Right. So for right now, though, generally speaking, the way that we track email openings and clicks and things like that is becoming slightly obscured by increased privacy settings in most email service providers. I think this is a great thing. It's very consumer-friendly. It's very email, you know, it's very friendly to the person whose email inbox you're appearing within.

2:05 However, what it means is that the results, the statistics you're seeing on your end when you send an email newsletter may not be quite as accurate as they were before. So it is entirely possible that somebody did open and read your email, but your email service provider will not record that because they have privacy blocking system. This actually happens to me all the time. I have some pretty good privacy control set up in my personal and my business inboxes. And I will definitely get re-engagement campaigns. That's what they're called when you resend it to somebody who hasn't opened it. I will definitely get those, even though I did open and read the first email. I'll get that second one that's like, you know, they resend it clearly to people they think didn't open it.

2:47 So first of all, you could be wrong. And it is a little bit irritating to get the same email twice, even if you change the subject line or whatnot. That's a minor irritation. The people that are opening your messages are probably not going to be so irritated by that that they unsubscribe. But it is a factor. We do want people to overall have a good experience with our messages. And it's, again, mildly irritating to get the same message twice. The other reason is because if you resend your message to people who didn't open it the first time, those are probably your least likely to be engaged subscribers. Some of them, yes, have great privacy settings, like I was talking about before. Some of them, for whatever reason, are just not in a place where they're opening your emails right now.

3:29 Maybe they lost interest, maybe they're on vacation, maybe they're sick, whatever's going on. So what that means is the second time you send it, if you're only sending it to people who didn't open it the first time, or you think didn't open it the first time, your open rates and your click rates are going to be pretty low. Substantially lower usually than the first time you sent it when you had all your normal subscribers who do like and click and read your messages all the time. So that second message is going to have lower statistics in terms of how many people read it, how many people open it, click on it, and so forth. And that actually doesn't look good. The regular email inbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo and whatever else people are using these days, the way that they decide who to filter into promotions and spam and wherever else they're putting it has more to do with these types of statistics, the low number of opens and clicks, than it does a lot of things.

4:26 So we want to be really careful about sending messages to people that we don't think are going to open our messages. So for that reason, it really doesn't make sense to just automatically send all of your newsletters a second time to people who didn't see it the first time. I wouldn't recommend that at this point in time. What you might consider is if you are running a promotion of some sort and you really want. The message to land in people's inboxes, and you're really hoping that the maximum number of people will see what you have sent out, and you want, you know, inboxes are busy, I understand, being like, yeah, well, it probably just got bumped down, you know, maybe they just didn't have a chance to see it, it might be helpful to send it a second time.

5:07 In that case, either just send a second email to everybody, if you really think that, or what you can do is send it to people who didn't open it, but filter by people who have opened or clicked on something from you in the last, say, three to six months. That way you're not sending it to people who haven't looked at anything from you in the last six years, but instead people who might be more likely to look at it. And again, I would only do that in cases where you feel pretty strongly that it would be important to you that this particular message gets opened by the most number of people. I actually don't personally do that, but if you really felt like you wanted to, those are really the circumstances that I would consider resending an email for the second time.

5:51 So in summary, generally speaking, as an automated rule, I would not recommend resending your newsletter to everybody who didn't open it the first time for the reasons that we already mentioned. Okay, I hope that helps. I really appreciate the question. If you have a question you would like me to answer here, whether it's a clinical topic or a question that's been on your mind about business, marketing, sales, anything like that, running a practice, time management, please feel free to send it in. I would love to answer your question here and I know it helps other people when you can hear the answers that, you know, the questions people are asking and the answers that come in from that. All right, so let's wrap that up. Thank you, as always, for listening.

6:33 If you would like to stay in touch, I would love to have you on my practitioner notes email newsletter. I send out a message every Thursday. It's got little tips and tidbits. Again, for practitioners, I usually share three recommendations of things that I have appreciated or enjoyed that week that might include books or recipes or tools, anything that's on my mind that I think might be helpful for you as well. So you can sign up at intheclinic.com or camillefreeman.com. Either one of those have an email sign up right there on the homepage. So I'd love to see you on Thursday when I send out my next message. Otherwise, have a great week, and I will be back soon.