So we sent out an email, and got a decent open rate, and a decent click-through rate, and even decent enquiry numbers. Should we follow it up? Of course we should.
One of the things about email nowadays is that it gets read all over the place. We’ll be quite lucky to catch many of our readers at a time and place (and on a device) where they can take the action we want.
If we’re worried about annoying them, we should just make sure that we don’t send the follow-up to those who clicked through (obviously we wouldn’t be sending to those who went all the way through to action). I don’t think there’s a problem with following up to those who opened the email but didn’t click through.
It’s probably counterproductive in the long run to make a better offer in a follow-up email, but we can make the offer more concise, and acknowledge (briefly!) that the reader might have already had this message once. I’ve never found that references to previous emails do any harm.
Depending on the offer, it might be worth revisiting the original message, and considering why recipients might not have taken action. As I mentioned, this could well be simply because the email was received in the wrong place or at the wrong time, but there might have been other objections which could be tackled in the follow-up.
I always see an email campaign as being a multi-stage process, and we shouldn’t be afraid of that.