How is your email marketing going?
Email is still the king of digital marketing for ROI, but it isn’t always easy to get it right. If you are not happy with your email marketing open rates and churn rate, it is time to rethink your emailing strategy.
Read on to learn about the best time to send marketing emails.
Best Practices For Email Marketing
When it comes to email marketing, there are some universally accepted pieces of advice that you should know:
Mondays are Bad
Everyone hates Mondays for the most part. Why is that? Because after a weekend away from work, they face a week filled with tasks for the week, including the emails they ‘left for next week’ on Friday and anything from over the weekend. On a Monday, people are most likely to delete any external emails to plan out there week.
No-one works Weekends
Now, this isn’t true for everyone, but when you are working with mass email marketing, you are unlikely to get many reads on a weekend. And if any recipients are working, they are probably too busy catching up on the weeks work to read a marketing email.
Straight Down the Middle
When sending emails, the safe approach is to play it down the middle. Tuesday-Thursday and around midday. This lets you avoid the most stressful days of the week, and the busiest parts of the day. By midday, people will be settling down for lunch and are more likely to check out their emails.
Give Notice
Most emails are opened within an hour of being received. But there are still a lot of emails that get filed away for a few days before being opened. So don’t wait too late to send out any reminders. Also don’t leave too short a window on promotions.
The Best Results for You
It is important to know that every company and audience is different. You need to know your best practices, and they should form the start of your sending strategy. But they aren’t always going to be true for you.
You may find that sends at one time of day result in higher opens, but lower clicks. The question is, which do you want?
The best way to find your best time to send marketing emails is to track the metrics.
Opens
Your open rate is the percentage of emails that are opened. Higher is of course better here. The percentage you are aiming for differs from industry to industry and the quality of your list. But if you are sending to warm prospects, you would expect more opens than a cold list.
Click-through
This is the amount of your opens that click the links in your email. An email should always have a call to action that you want your readers to follow through with. Send them to a landing page, contact us form or anything else. If your values are low, then you are failing to engage them.
A/B Testing
These metrics are useless unless you have values to compare them with. Try sending out emails at different times of the day. Send some emails later, some email blasts earlier. Consider working with a digital marketing agency to develop an email A/B testing strategy.
The Best Time to Send Marketing Emails
As you can see, there isn’t a definitive best time to send marketing emails. Although there are universally accepted best practices, each company is slightly different and the only way to get the answer is to test until you find your sweet spot.
If you found this article on email marketing to be useful, be sure to check out our other blog posts. Visit the Marketing section of the Everything Entrepreneur Blog to learn more about digital advertising.
