How do I resend an edition to readers who didn't open it?

A good edition often reaches more people on the second try. Plenty of readers simply missed the first email — it arrived at a busy moment, or the subject line didn’t catch them. Resending to non-openers sends that same edition again, with a subject line you rewrite, to only the people who didn’t open it.

You don’t rebuild anything. Letterhead reuses the edition’s content and the audience you originally sent to, then leaves out everyone who already opened it.

Send a resend

1. Open Emails and find a published edition in the list. You can also start from a recent edition on your channel’s home page.
2. Choose Resend to non-openers on that edition’s row.
3. Write a new subject line. It starts as the original edition’s subject, and changing it is the point — the readers you’re reaching are the ones the first subject didn’t land with.
4. Pick a send date and time. The scheduler shows the current time in your channel’s sending timezone right beneath the field, so you can pick a moment that suits your readers without converting timezones in your head. Choose a time at least five minutes out.
5. Choose Schedule.

The resend then behaves like any other scheduled edition: it appears in your Emails list with its send time, and moves through the same statuses on its way out — see What do Letterhead statuses mean?.

Who receives it

The audience is the one you sent the original to, minus anyone who opened it.

Two consequences worth knowing before you schedule:

• Opens keep arriving after you schedule. Letterhead works out who to leave out as the resend goes out, not when you schedule it. Someone who opens the original in between is left out, which is what you want.
• If nobody opened the original, everybody gets it again. With no opens to subtract, the resend reaches the whole audience — so it’s worth a glance at the edition’s report first.

What you can resend

Only an edition that has already been sent. A draft or a scheduled edition has no opens to work from yet, so the option doesn’t appear on it.

Resending works on channels Letterhead delivers itself. If your channel sends through a connected provider such as Iterable or Mailchimp, Letterhead tells you resending isn’t available for that channel when you try to schedule it.

Writing the second subject line

The subject line is the one thing your non-openers have already seen and passed over, so it’s worth changing rather than resending as-is. If you’d like a hand, Smart Subjects can draft alternatives for you — see Smart Subjects.

The edition’s content stays exactly as it was published. If you want to change what’s inside the email as well, duplicate the edition and schedule it as a new send instead.