MailChimp has some nice built-in features that allow you to segment your lists for various reasons. For example, you can identify people who have a specific star rating and create a segment just of those folks. You can identify subscribers who haven’t opened any of the last 5 campaign you’ve sent, which is helpful if you are considering proactively paring down your subscriber lists. You can also segment by those who clicked inside an email, by signup source, and even by e-commerce activities.

The segment type we are focusing on today is those people who didn’t open your most recent email campaign.

A few months back, I heard the tip to resend your new email campaign to those who didn’t open it after the initial send out, using a brand new and totally different subject line. The premise here is to see if a different email subject can garner additional opens of your content. It doesn’t require much work (as you’ll see below) and you can get more of your current subscriber base reading your stuff. A client of ours is using this strategy and seeing great results from it, and we’ve done our own recent test and were very pleased with the number of additional opens we got as well.

How to Resend a MailChimp Campaign to Unopens

From your MailChimp dashboard, locate your most recent campaign. Since we are resending an existing campaign, we need to first make a copy of that campaign.

On the right side of that campaign, click on the arrow to reveal the drop down menu. Select Replicate.

On the next screen, locate the list you used for your most recent campaign, and then click on “Send to a New Group or Segment“.

Set the parameters for your campaign resend. This is also the spot where you can sort by star rating, e-commerce activity, etc.

In this case, we’re choosing Campaign Activity, Did Not Open, and the name of our most recent campaign from the list. Then click “Next” in the bottom right corner and continue with your MailChimp newsletter build process.

The next screen is where you name your campaign and update the email subject line. Changing the email subject line is critical if you want to increase your total number of opens. I’d recommend trying something completely different than your first subject line.

Since you are moving through the typical newsletter build process, feel free to change anything else you might like, including the email preview pane.

When you get through all the newsletter build steps, schedule it like normal. Since you are trying to reach those who didn’t open it the first time, I’d recommend sending out this email newsletter on a different day of the week and/or time of day.

Now you need to wait and see how well this works for your email subscriber audience.

Have you ever used this feature? What kind of difference did it make in your total campaign open rate?