If you’re a busy email marketer, it’s easy to send an email, check it off your list, and move onto the next campaign. With a packed calendar of messages combining various strategies segments, and creative, one can get lost in the execution and miss sight of the bigger picture – is your email marketing contributing as much as possible to your KPIs? Are there any strategies you should be employing to squeeze more out of each campaign?

One specific example we’ve been utilizing at DMi with our ecommerce clients is a simple but effective one – when running an email campaign promoting an ecommerce sale, we send an email at the start of the promotion to inform our list that it’s live. Later, within the last 6-12 hours of the sale, we send a “Time is running out” or “Sale ends soon” email. This email can be very similar to the announcement email. There may be minor edits to the creative, or it may be identical but with a new subject line and preheader.

Sending this email to cap off a sale offers customers that may have missed the initial email, started a purchase but abandoned, or read but not clicked your first email a second chance to purchase. The potential downside is a spike in unsubscribes and complaints due to what could be seen as a redundant or repetitive email. However, our clients have not seen any noticeable spike in unsubscribe rates. Across 3 recent tests, the unsubscribe level stayed consistent from the first email (the sale announcement) to the second email (the sale ends soon email). And the upside was very clear – we were able to increase our attributed revenue from our promotional emails for by 32%. From an engagement perspective, our open rate was actually higher on our sale ends soon email (+6%), suggesting that the urgency of an approaching end time was a powerful motivator.

So the next time you’ve got a promotional email on your calendar, consider the simple but effective strategy of adding an additional reminder email towards the end of the sale. The upside is low, and the added revenue is icing on the cake for your email metrics.