Recently Andrew Robinson wrote about how to use follow up email to increase your ROI. As he discussed, implementing follow up email messages into your email marketing campaigns can achieve excellent results with minimal time and effort. Follow up emails can increase open rates and clickthrough rates, web sessions and sales. In this post I will elaborate more on the how and why of this strategy, including more real results.

24 hour follow up email to non-openers:

This follow up email should be sent 24 hours after the first email only to people who did not open the original email. Keep the email format "text only" - even though it may not have the same visual impact as HTML, text does have a personal feel. It also eliminates any HTML/image rendering issues that could prevent inbox delivery.

Only a few minor updates and tweaks to the first follow up email may be required for the text version, i.e. the subject line should be changed from the first email. This keeps the time investment for the follow up campaign to a minimum.

As long as the content is still relevant to recipients, you will see an increase in engagement. For example, an art institution in the UK, with a list of only 10,000 email addresses, had a 4% increase in open rate and CTR, and 36% uplift in revenue.

For a UK sports retailer we have seen this text-only follow up strategy produce an 8% increase in open rate and CTR, and a 67% revenue uplift. It has been so successful for them, in fact, that follow up messages are now part of all their weekly email marketing campaigns.

24 hour follow up email to clickers without purchase:

Again this follow up email should be sent 24 hours after the first campaign. The segment selection contains all people who clicked on the first email but did not make a purchase, and excludes all users who did make a purchase from the first email.

These are highly engaged members who displayed interest in the email message but may need that extra push or incentive to make a purchase. Again this should be text only, however the message needs to be more incentivized and usually contains an offer.

Targeting for the follow up email can also be taken one step further using web analytics to:  

• Personalise the email content with relevant information
• Define timing of email - schedule send when recipients are most likely to engage with it
  
  

For example, a fashion retailer has seen an extra 67% in revenue from sending this type of follow-up email to people who clicked through to the "dresses" page from the first email but didn’t make a purchase.

When the art institution mentioned above offered a 10% discount in a 24-hour follow up email, they recorded a 14% increase in open rate and CTR, and extra revenue of 40%.

As the results of these follow up email campaigns illustrate, simple but effective thinking can drive opens, clicks, sessions and ultimately ROI. Stay tuned for part 2 of Andrew's post with answers to frequently asked questions about this email marketing strategy - coming soon!

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• Download free online-marketing guides, tools and webinars in the Lyris Online-Marketing Resource Center.

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