We have had a client who mainly sends out surveys, and they generally send out an email to a specifically targeted group and ask them to fill out a survey and they will be entered into a drawing for a gift certificate (these emails are concise, no graphics with a single link to the survey).  After they send out the initial email they wait a bit of time and then send out a reminder email to everyone who has not completed the survey with the same request.

We were curious about of the value of the reminder campaign.  Here is a summary of the data for two for two of these campaigns:

As we would expect the open rates drop slightly between the initial and reminder campaign, we would expect this for either a couple of reasons:

1. We have removed people who filled out the survey from receiving the reminder survey, these people may be more inclined to click and open this type of survey
2. People seem roughly the same subject line (the only difference in the subject line is we put a Reminder: in front) and figured they have already opened it once so not to bother.
3. The collection lag, i.e. the initial campaign has been out longer so more time for people to open the email (I think that this is not very likely since opens trickle in after a week of time)

In the first campaign we also saw a drop in the unique click through open rate (this is the proportion of unique people who have clicked on at least one link in the email who have been tracked to open the email), and somewhat surprisingly we saw a large increase in the unique click through open rate in the second campaign.

Also it is worth pointing out, that some people are surprised to see that the combined unique open/click through rates are larger than the either the initial or the reminder, the reason for this is because of the size of the overlap of openers between these two groups, the smaller the overlap the larger the combined open rate will be (if there were no one who open the second that opened the first), then the combined open rate would be the sum of the initial and the reminder and on the other hand if there was a perfect overlap then the combined open rate would be the same as the initial.  The unique click through open rate is affected in the same manner.

As we mentioned earlier we wanted to know about the value of the reminder campaign to our client so we dug into the people who open:

From this table we can roughly see that these two campaigns break down the same way as far as when unique people are opening these campaigns, i.e. roughly 44% of people who open the campaigns opened both, 30% will only open the first and 26% will not open the first then open the reminder campaign.

The next question we were curious about is do these new impressions (these are the people that did not open the first email but opened the second) behave differently than our initial impression group (these are people that opened the first email or the dual impression group (people who opened both emails)?

Clearly we can see from the data from both campaigns that the value of the reminder campaign is not the dual impression, i.e. people who ignored our call to action the first time and then heeded the second (since their click through rate is roughly 2.8% in both campaigns), the value of the reminder campaign is getting new people to open the email, since there behavior is much like the behavior of one time openers from the initial impression. 

As the saying goes you can never beat a first impression, since both the initial and reminder impression should be considered a first impression, the results seem to bear this out.  We will keep looking at this type of data to see if these type of trends continue to be seen.

Take Away

1. First impressions matter (the initial opening email and heeding the call to action), though it does not seem to matter if it takes 1 or 2 attempts for that first impression.
2. If the call to action is not effective the first time, it is unlikely to be effective the second time to the same people.

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