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After all the time and testing that goes into producing a polished email message, a common fear among marketers is that when they send will have a greater influence on success than what they send. To an extent, these fears are warranted, but the idea that there exists any "right" day and time to send email is an easy trap to fall into. Instead, try keeping a few key points in mind the next time a last-minute image swap delays your email deployment and panic begins to set in.
Relevance Rules the Land
The most important question to answer before sending email to your mailing list is this: is the content relevant to the recipients? If the answer is yes, you've cleared the biggest obstacle between an average performance and a successful one. Remember, the majority of your subscribers receive email seven days a week from a variety of sources, and relevance plays the most important role in making your message stand out from the pack-no matter when you send.
The 3-day Work Week Has Yet to Catch On
Historically, Tuesday through Thursday have proven to be the days when the most commercial email is delivered each week, and with good reason; vacation days, summer hours and busy weekend schedules tend to put a dent in the performance of emails sent on Friday through Monday. However, this knowledge has scared many email marketers completely away from mailing on non-peak days, leading to three days of crowded inboxes around the world during the middle of each week. Some marketers try to send late at night in an effort to be "top of the inbox" the following morning, but this can backfire as many recipients delete non-work related emails as soon as they begin their day in order to narrow down the number of messages they need to sort through. If your emails' performance starts to slip, it would be worth sending to a portion of your list on a non-peak day to see how the numbers measure up. Arriving as one of a few unread messages in an inbox on a Monday might help your message stand out more than arriving as one of a dozen (or more) messages the following morning. Another testable approach is to schedule your deployments at off times rather than the top and bottom of the hour favored by many marketers.
Your Audience Is Busy
After all the testing and fine-tuning that goes into an email message, it's easy to forget the largest variable is the one that marketers have no control over-the availability of their subscribers. Refreshing your ESP's reporting tools for updates every five minutes after deploying a message would make sense if your audience was collectively champing at the bit in anticipation of your email, but the reality is that a significant amount of activity often occurs more than 12 hours after the initial send. For your busy subscribers, leaving a message unopened so they can revisit it when they have more time is one of the great luxuries of email. Give your metrics time to accumulate if they aren't where you want them to be shortly after a message deployment, and never sacrifice quality in the name of sending by a certain pre-determined time. Even if it means sending at the "wrong" time of day, taking extra time to make your message as attractive as possible is worth the risk.
Email Marketing Is Made for Flexibility
Remember that the power of email marketing lies in its ability to be customized and utilized in many different ways, and the day/time you send your messages is no exception. Unless your weekly e-newsletter is titled "Wednesday at 10:30 a.m." you have free rein to test the performance of your messages on any day at any time until you find the schedule that delivers the best results. Ask 10 email marketers for the best time of day to send emails, and you may get 10 different answers. They didn't figure out the best day and time to send email, they figured out their best day and time-and so will you.
For more information on this and other over-hyped email marketing issues, download our new white paper
"Don't Believe the Hype!: Focus Your Email Marketing Energy Where it Really Matters."
To learn more about using SubscriberMail to increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns, contact us today.
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