The importance of email timing
Posted: December 20th, 2010Following up on last months article regarding the importance of Newsletters i decided to write another article describing my latest findings. (Keep in mind i am not a writer, so i may get off track here 
)
Today there are many tracking system, analytics and all other kinds of cool toys out there, but most people forget the basics of a good email delivery -> TIMING!
And what i mean by this is: When you send out a batch of emails, they are getting delivered over a period of time, depending on the length of your email list it can take many hours. And many people just do not think enough about that!
Based on experience, here are some scenarios, lets say the delivery of my entire list takes 4 hours:
NOTE: This target group here is professionals with Internet access at the work place, of course if you business is in something different, this does not apply to you, but based on my experience i have a lot of data, so just ask
| Delivery Time | Reason |
|---|---|
| Early Morning Delivery (3 AM) Open Rate: VERY LOW |
People get to their work place, or check their email in the morning before work, their inbox is filled with Spam, Updates, Automated emails etc, the chance of them opening and engaging into your email is very low! |
| Morning Delivery (9 AM) Open Rate: Low |
People finished sorting trough the spam and automated emails, and getting ready to start their work day as your email arrives, in most cases they have too much on their todo list, upcomming meetings, follow ups etc to really engage into your email, they may not delete it, but in will move down in the inbox below the fold rather quickly! |
| Noon Delivery (1 PM) Open Rate: Low |
Most people are either on lunch or just returning from lunch, when people return from lunch they have already some work emails in their inbox, and are less likely to enjoy yours, people who are leaving for lunch, you know how that goes.. |
| Afternoon Delivery (4-5 PM) Open Rate: Good |
This is one of the top times for Newsletters and Customer Mailings, the reader is about to leave for work, is doing some browsing, and mostly already checked out of work, its also the perfect time for gift shopping etc! |
| Night Delivery (7+ PM) Open Rate: Risky |
This one is open to debate on a lot of conferences and has very opposite views, for some business night mailings are best, for other they produce almost no returns. It is risky but for the right business a gold mine, some of my clients had higest conversions at the late night hours. |
The second item many people disregard is the send order, my client XYZ recently hired me to improve the performance of their email campaigns, their basic logic was
Select from all my customers that want to get email and send.
This client started his emails at 4 PM, and got some medium returns, his problem was that the delivery of his email list (150.000) took about 5 hours, so when his system started his campaign, it just blindly selected members in the order that the entries where created in the list (most system do that), the problem here is that the oldest members got them email at the best time 4-5 PM, while the newest members got the email between 9 and 10 PM.
When looking at the analytics for this we can see that most of the email traffic was created between 4 and 5 PM.
So for the next day, we changed the list order to something like this:
Select all from my customers and then sort it by last logged-in or visited date , and see what happened
We archived an improvement of 50% since then i has been a steady improvement of %10 percent every day! So this has gotten a bit longer then i thought but bottom line is:
- Make sure you send it out at the correct time of day (depending on your target audience)
- Make sure you email first the active users / customers so they get it in the right time
