You all know the importance of sending branded emails with relevant content - we fuss over spam filters, subject lines, great offers, calls to action and segmentation. Its possible a lack of response is just the timing of your campaign - it's a challenge to know when to send them, does that sounds familiar?
Don’t forget your organisation won't be the only emails your customers have subscribed to, so when they check, your email may be one of many; Facebook alerts, internal business emails and a reminder to pick up the children on the way home.
What others are saying.
The industry generally agrees Tuesday to Thursday are the best days for sending branded emails - most agreeing that late morning to lunchtime is the optimum time. In our opinion, it varies. Here are something’s for you to consider.
Consider how we read our email.
Have a think about this, some may read emails on the way to work via a mobile, some may get to the office early and read your mails first thing. Other times, they may read them at the end of business or Facebook alerts in the evening - but if email is targeted and relevant, the chances are they'll read them straight away.
Is this helping? Perhaps not, the point is you could say there is a frame work of say Tuesday to Thursday but we find each of our clients campaigns require different approaches with different messages in order to reach different audiences.
For example: if you are sending emails to a predominantly female audience about a theatre show at the weekend - they may need time to chat this over with a partner or organise a group of friends - that may take two days so Wednesday may work best. Ultimately the way forward is to test.
You've probably been brainstorming and thought through these scenarios - if you have not tested your campaigns yet may I suggest its well worth the investment in time - we have seen the results and they are quite dramatic.
How do you workout when to send?
You may want to look at your past results, you have a lot of results sitting in your analytic reports.
Why not take a few months of reports and plot when a campaign was sent and the responses/sales, if there is a pattern emerging then document it. If you don’t have that data then start now and vary the times you send your campaigns - if you send your campaigns out at the same time you won't have data to compare the results.
Look at segmentation of your audience by time of response or action - do young or old, male of female have different habits - is the device they are reading their emails from change their opening times? Do Facebook alerts change anything?
Think about this, email is a great way to get to your clients but think beyond email for a moment. Timing is very relevant for email campaigns - the same concepts apply timing of your blog posts, Tweets or Facebook updates.
Campaigns sent verses emails received.
Email campaigns are not delivered as soon as they are sent - some networks can take time to deliver emails, it can take a few hours to get through to your entire database. If you have in your plan the "optimum time to send," we suggest if you have a large database then leave time before and after the optimum time to make sure all your database fits in with that optimum window.
Alternatively you may want to consider breaking up your database into more segments, then you can analyse the results in more detail.
If you want to chat this through with us call 0131 454 3311 or send us an email here.