Email Marketing: When Is The Best Time To Email?
By Anna Johnson on June 10th, 2010As we recently discussed in Kikabink News (see Email Marketing: What’s The ONE Tactic That Makes The Biggest Difference?) indicated, email marketers regard the timing of their emails as the best indicator of success of an email marketing campaign.
Yet, there is no single ‘best time’ to send for all email marketers. It depends on the target market, the type of email you intend to send and many other factors that will vary from one email marketer’s situation to another’s situation. You need to test send times and see what generates the best open rates, click-through rates (CTRs), and most importantly conversion rates, or whatever other metric you use to measure success!
But that begs the question: how should you go about testing email send times?
Well, here are some quick tips for testing email send times that I gleaned from a recent MarketingSherpa article.
1. Stagger emails to cover different time zones
If you have a large email subscriber base that is dispersed across time zones, the best approach may be to stagger your email drop. At the very least, by testing send times across multiple time zones, you may arrive at one or several ‘sweet spots’. These are those times that generate the best overall response. Alternatively, you may be better off segmenting your subscribers based on time zone and staggering email drops accordingly.
2. Test workdays vs. weekends
Especially if you’re targeting business-to-consumer (B2C) email subscribers, it’s a good idea to test emails sent during workdays versus the weekend.
One way to arrive at the best time to send email to B2C subscribers is to carve out subscribers with a ‘personal’ email address (e.g. based on a web client such as Yahoo or Gmail or an Internet service provider such as iinet.net.au) and test their responsiveness to an email drop on the weekend versus an email drop during a workday.
3. Identify the most popular day(s) for signups
If most subscribers tend to sign up to your list on specific days, it’s not far fetched to imagine that they might be most responsive to your emails on those very same days. Consequently, test sending emails on those popular days.
4. Consider past open and click activity
By looking at historical metrics you may be able to uncover optimal times and days to send emails.
Source: Sean Donahue, “Discover the Best Time to Send Email: 4 Test Ideas,” MarketingSherpa, May 13, 2010
