When do you need to send out your newsletter? If you send it too late it will be found at an irrelevant time for the receiver. Send it too early and it’s at the bottom of the inbox. Make sure to send out your e-mail newsletters at a relevant time! This is the last blog of the first sight improvement triology for e-mail marketeers. And this is the most difficult. When do I need to send out my newsletter?
Let me get to the point immediately: there is no golden rule concerning the time in which you need to send your e-mail newsletter. There are however two general methods that will help you find the right time for you to send out your e-mail newsletter. [1] Reason what’s the best moment for your customer to read your newsletter, [2] experiment, measure, experiment, measure, …
Reason what is the best time for your customer to read your e-mail newsletter
When your e-mail is received at a bad time for the customer, he will probably read it quickly and forget it. It is thus of importance that the customer receives your e-mail at a proper time, at a moment that he/she has the time to read it. Research by eROI illustrates that newsletters are hardly read on sunny days. So that means that factors such as weather should be taken into account. Business newsletters are read during working hours. Thus make sure to send these e-mails when people can read them. Good times for workers to read their e-mail are monday morning and friday in the afternoon. I would suggest to take monday, as a lot of people do not work on fridays and the people working try to finish their work for that week.
Non business related newsletters are sent to people’s private e-mail accounts and are mostly not read during office hours. These e-mails are often read during lunchbreak and after working hours. So try to get into the minds of your customers and reason when they have the time to read their e-mail and focus on these moments.
Experiment, measure, experiment, measure, …
The best way however is to measure your activities, adjust, measure, optimize, measure, etc. Keep on measuring. A few weblogs ago I illustrated how you can measure your e-mail effectiveness with the help of Google Analytics. It is important to start with the previous step: reason from your customer’s perspective, and fine tune by measuring and optimizing. Not every customer is the same so different rules hold for different types of organizations. An important thing during measurement is that you change one variable at a time to see the effect of this variable change. In your statistics also take elements like the weather, soccer games, etc. into account. These can heavily influence your openingrates.
Wegopro also has an interesting idea on how to measure e-mail effectiveness. They state that you create landing pages for your e-mail marketing activities that are not indexed by search engines (modify your robots.txt). In this way you can measure exactly your newsletter traffic. Another way to do this is as illustrated in my previous weblog in Google Analytics and filter on Newsletters.
Succes!!
