How To Resend Unopened Emails In ActiveCampaign

In this video, I want to share a quick tip about how you can resend unopened emails automatically in ActiveCampaign.

I love this simple strategy because it gives you a second chance to get your contacts engaged ๐Ÿ™Œ

Why should you resend emails?

It’s important that people open your emails so that they stay engaged.

So by tracking who opens your emails, and who isn’t, you can automatically resend an email to give people a second chance to engage with your content.

How do you resend emails in ActiveCampaign?

To resend emails, we have to add a few things to our automation.

In this example, we start our automation with an email:

add email to your activecampaign automation

It’s important that Open/read tracking & link tracking are enabled in the campaign overview of this email:

enable open and link tracking inside your email

This way, ActiveCampaign knows when someone opens an email or clicks a link inside an email.

We use both open &  link tracking because some people block images inside their email program.

(the ActiveCampaign tracking pixel is an image)

So by checking if someone clicked a link, we can double-check if someone did not engage with the email.

After that email, we add a 2 day wait.

You can do this by clicking the plus ยป Conditions and Workflow ยป Wait.

add 2 day wait to your automation

Then, we’ll add an if/else to check if the contact opened or clicked a link inside this email.

With the if/else, you can split the automation based on if a contact matches the conditions or not.

We want to check if the contact opened the email OR clicked a link in the email, so we set the conditions like this:

split automation by setting conditions to check open or clicked email

Our automation will then look like this:

what the automation looks like with the if else

Contacts who follow the yes-path did interact with the email, contacts who follow the no-path didn’t.

It depends a bit on your automation, but if you want you could continue the automation & send another email to contacts who opened:

add second email to automation

Contacts who didn’t open, we want to resend the same email.

To do this, we’re going to create a new email.

I like to give it a clear name so that I know it’s a resend:

create resend email

Click Create, and go over to Past campaigns.

Here, you’ll find the previous email.

select your past campaign

Select it & give it a different subject.

give the email a different subject

And save the email by clicking Save and exit.

save the email

Then, if you like, you can add another wait after the resend email.

add another wait after the resend email

And use a Go To to continue with the automation ๐Ÿ™‚

add a go to action to continue the automation

And that’s it!

If people don’t open the first email, they’ll automatically get the same email again with a different subject 2 days later ๐Ÿ’ช๐Ÿ˜‡

That’s it!

Now you know how to resend emails automatically in ActiveCampaign ๐Ÿ˜„

Easy to implement, big opportunity.

What do you think? ๐Ÿ™Œ

Let me know in the comments below.

I would love to hear from you ๐Ÿค—

Avatar of Max van Collenburg
Max van Collenburg

I'm addicted to travel, love a good cappuccino, have two cute cats, and craft actionable content for online business owners that want to grow their business with non-sleazy marketing & automation. More weird facts about me here.

11 thoughts on “How To Resend Unopened Emails In ActiveCampaign”

  1. Avatar of Brad Spencer

    Just discovered you on Youtube and came to your site.

    Absolutely love how you explain this. Makes this sooo much easier than most people who teach AC.

    Thanks! You’ve got a new fan!

    Brad

    • Avatar of Max van Collenburg

      Thanks for the kind words Brad! Glad you like it ๐Ÿ˜„

  2. Avatar of Ben

    Hey Max,

    I’ve been looking at a few of your tutorials (they’ve been super helpful!) – I notice that you use automations for a lot of your emails, as opposed to a singular email campaign. Are there any examples where you could use a campaign over and automation or do you mainly use automations like this one even for a one-off campaign so you can automate the re-send process?

    Thanks!

    B

    • Avatar of Max van Collenburg

      Hey Ben! Good question!

      I usually stick to automations as I try to automate as much as possible. But if there’s an email I really only want to send out once, I would use a campaign.

      Hope that helps!

  3. Avatar of Allison

    Hi Max, this is super helpful! I noticed you left the trigger blank. Can you clarify how you start an automation without a trigger? Thanks!

    • Avatar of Max van Collenburg

      Happy to hear it’s helpful, Allison! ๐Ÿค—

      There’s a couple of ways to start an automation that doesn’t have a trigger;

      • You can start the automation from another automation with a ‘Start an automation’ block.
      • You can manually add people to an automation in the contacts their profile
      • You can manually add everyone to an automation by using the ‘Edit all’ button on the contacts overview. On that same page, you can also click in the field ‘Search contacts’ > ‘Advanced search’ to make segments of your list, if you don’t want to add everyone that’s on a list.
      • Bit more advanced, but you can also start automations through ActiveCampaign their API.

      Hope that helps!

  4. Avatar of Valentina

    Hello Max,
    and thank you for this super useful tutorial! I have a question: when I try to set the “Does the contact match the following conditions?” piece, its settings don’t list my specific emails, but 3 generic kind of emails (like “Any personalized email”, or “Any email”). What’s wrong here? Thank you!

    • Avatar of Max van Collenburg

      Hey Valentina! You will get a full list of all your email when you choose ‘Campaign’ out of the three options ๐Ÿ˜„

      • Avatar of Valentina

        Thank you or the reply! Now I see where I was wrong ๐Ÿ™‚

  5. Avatar of Milos

    Hello Max,
    I think, that you have mistake in one part of the algorithm. In the last picture you send contact by goto instruction to send second email. I think, taht better is again to test, if contact opend or clicked in resend email. If YES, then to swith him to send innstruction of secon email. In oposit situation (no click, no opening) to finish automation or to do another proces.
    What is your opinion?
    Thanks for reaction.
    Milos (in our language – Czech Miloลก)

    • Avatar of Max van Collenburg

      Hey Milos! Obviously that’s possible, but I think it depends on the kind of automation you are creating ๐Ÿ™‚

      In some cases you might want to end the automation, other times you want to just continue to the next email.

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