The right time to send email marketing

A question which stumps many email marketers is “When is the right time to send my email promotions to get the best response?”. Adestra are constantly asked this question by clients and industry contacts. The truth is, there is no universally correct answer.

In this article we discuss the factors you should consider when choosing the time best for your email marketing.

Dispelling the myths of a perfect industry time

Studies have been released that suggest that there is a specific day and time that email marketing should broadcast their emails.

For example:

Source: eROI. Q1 2005 study

This suggests that most marketers send email promotions on Tuesday to Thursday.

But what does this mean? Should email marketing be sent on a Monday or Friday when email volumes are down? Should it be sent between Tuesday to Thursday as marketers must be sending at these times for a reason?

In the real world, there are too many things to consider that make this unpractical:

List fatigue

In large companies, many marketers tend to be emailing the same lists. This means that one contact may be receiving numerous communications from the same company in a short time period. If all senders chose a specific time, say 10am, then the contact will receive multiple messages at the same time.

In effect, the company is creating noise for themselves and drowning out their own messages.

Response handling

If promotions are sent at a certain time of day and 60% of response happens within 3 hours, are your call centres resourced to handle the inbound enquiries?

Web site capaibility

If you’re pushing people to the web site, can your web site handle concurrent users at once or will it crash? Should you be using email at the quieter times on your server, rather than creating extra load at already busy times?

Audience

From a personal perspective, when I open my inbox on a Monday morning, I delete the majority of the emails I have received over the weekend. However, if I receive your email throughout the day, I find I am much more interested in reading it.

If you’re a B2B marketer, then broadcasting promotions on a weekend will mean that your message is amongst other communications. Ask yourself if this sensible?

Likewise, as an international marketer, there may be time differences to consider and bank holidays which are different to the UK.

Competitors

If your competitors are email heavy, do you want your marketing message to land at the same time encouraging comparisons or would they be better off landing at a separate time?

So what is the answer?

The conclusion is that there is no perfect industry time to send emails.

However, there is a method to discover the best time for your individual email promotions- This is to analyse your web logs to see when people are choosing to use your web site. If you look at the last 6 months you’ll discover busy times, and assuming your web site can handle additional load at this time, it is a fair conclusion that this is you preferred time to send.

However, you must be aware that previous email promotions may have skewed your results. If looking at web logs, and you see that lunch-time between 11am and 3pm are the busiest, could this be because email promotions have been going out at 11am for past months distorting the results?

The alternative is to develop relevant communications which are sent to contacts based upon their behaviour. Following up an individual based upon a trigger or an action (form completion, click through etc), is much more relevant and effective than a scheduled load and blast. Look out for more information in future editions of Adestra updates on how behavioural targeting will fast become the essential way to improving campaign response.

Free whitepapers

All Adestra clients enjoy unlimited support. Let us support you with one of our free whitepapers on email marketing:

• Challenges facing UK Email Marketers: survey of email marketers and advice on how to overcome them
• SPAM Filters demystified white paper: a marketers briefing
• How to pick the right email partner handbook
• Best practice email design: A guide for designers and marketers to creating HTML for modern email clients

For your free email marketing whitepapers, please contact us