Hitting a trifecta in email marketing — right message, right person, right time — is tricky. Janelle Johnson, director of demand generation at marketing automation provider Act-On Software, shares insights on the timing.
Conventional wisdom suggests that you should never send on Monday, because that’s when everyone is swamped and too busy to click on every email that’s sitting unread in their inbox. Many companies opt for Tuesdays and Wednesdays and avoid the end of the week, too. But is conventional wisdom right, or does the data tell a different story? Johnson says it depends on the audience, the type of message you’re sending, and a host of other things. If you really want to know the right “when,” she says, start by asking some other questions before diving in.
Who are the recipients? Nothing is more important than knowing what works for your audience — or for particular segments of your audience. One size does not fit all. Who are you emailing? Are they hot prospects, inactive leads or long-time customers? What time zone are they in? The “who” will help inform the “when” as well as the “how often.”
What are you sending? According to benchmark data analysis by ON24, the middle of the week is the best for webinar promotional emails, with Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday significantly outperforming the rest of the week. But don’t ignore weekends. Act-On discovered that email with its summary of newsletter blog posts performed better on Saturday than Friday, which makes sense. Busy people don’t always have time to read longer blog posts during the week; getting caught up over the weekend is how many deal with overscheduled days.
Experiment. If you have a big enough list, you can use a split test to determine which day works best. Divide your list into seven homogeneous groups. Send the exact same email to each group at the same time — varying only the day of sending for each group. Of course, you’ll want to repeat this process a few times to make sure you have enough data to see a clear trend, and you may want to repeat it using a different time.
Remember, the preferences of your audience are likely to change over time. Sending an email at noon on Tuesday might be the best option this year, but next year it could be different. Continually test the timing of your messages and track the open trends.
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