Don't just hit send and stop: One of the best parts of email marketing comes in the follow-up

Sending out your marketing email is just one step. Some of the most rewarding work when it comes to driving action is in the follow-up.

Next time you send a company newsletter or an offer to your list, divide the email audience into three categories based on what they did with your email: the openers, the clickers, and the non-openers.

For this example, let’s say you’re a small business focused on home service, and you just sent an email reminding people to schedule their winter tune-up.

We’ll split people out into three groups based on what they did with your email.

The openers

Your openers are the ones who opened the email but didn’t click through to schedule anything. They’re somewhat interested in what you say but not enough to want to click on anything, or maybe they were just busy that day.

I would contact this group again at the start of the following week with something like, “Limited appointments still available,” letting them know you have a few openings left to schedule their tune-up. Creating a sense of urgency might generate a few more appointments.

The readers who clicked

Next, let’s look at the clickers. These people were interested enough to click through on something in your email.

If your software tells you whether or not they scheduled a tune-up, you can hyper-target here and just hit the ones that clicked but didn’t schedule something.

Otherwise, you can hit this group with something like “Three things to know about winter tune-ups,” which will be relevant to all of the clickers. You can include a line about “Contact us to schedule yours if you haven’t yet.” This reminder will likely drive a few more appointments your way.

The non-openers

Finally, it would be great to hit the non-openers with a personal message to get their attention. If you have more than one email address attached to your email marketing platform, you could send this email from a different address.

For example, if you sent the initial email from the company, have this next one be from the Owner/CEO/President or an account rep they’ll work with.

You can also use the subject line to get this group’s attention. If you can’t send the email from a different person, have the subject line say, “A message from the owner.”

Use the same email you sent the first time but with a short note at the top from the owner, saying they don’t want them to miss out on getting a tune-up before winter arrives. Or, leverage an AI tool to re-write the email for a quick refresh of your message.

This personal email will likely bring you new openers, clickers, and appointments.

One more step you can take: slice and dice again

You can return to the three groups a week or two later and hit your new segments of openers, clickers, and did-not-opens with a new set of messages. Each time you send a message in this process, you get a new set of these three groups.

The possibilities are endless.

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