How To Determine The Best Day Of The Week To Send Email Marketing

What is the best time to send your email campaigns?

What is the best time to send your email campaigns?

It isn’t just the email header or preheader that is important in determining the success of your email marketing campaigns. The timing of your campaign is really important. Send it too early and the consumer can either ignore your email, spam it, or just read it and forget about it.

So how can you determine when the best day is to send your email marketing campaign?

There Is No Magic Time

Unfortunately, there is no real ‘best time’ that is universal for all companies. It really depends on your product, service and audience. The only way you can determine when your audience is going to be more receptive to your marketing messages is to analyse the data yourself from past campaigns.

This can be a complex task, and there are different ways that you can measure the success of campaigns, depending on what you are trying to achieve. You also have to consider that some offers will not be as enticing as other campaigns – this can skew your results and make you miss the ideal times because your campaign wasn’t good enough.

Levelling The Playing Field

An option to prevent campaign results being skewed is to test the same email copy on multiple days/times. This is known as split testing. Most email marketing programs have automated systems that can help you set this up and monitor the results.

The disadvantage of this is that you need to have a significant number of subscribers each day for this to work. The more subscribers you have in a test segment, the greater the accuracy of the results and therefore you should not have a segment with less than 300 subscribers, though preferably it should be approximately 500.

This may mean that you have to test two days a week at a time to discover the ideal day. The best case scenario means that it could, therefore, take a minimum of six weeks to test the combinations available.

Another disadvantage is that the time of the email could be more important than the actual date. For instance, sending the email at 10 am on Monday might perform better than an email sent at the same time on Tuesday. However, the same email being sent at 2 pm on Tuesday could perform better than the 10 am on Monday. If you discount Tuesday too early in the testing, then you might miss out on opportunities.

Therefore, stringent testing needs to be done.

Not Just The Day But Also The Date

Another thing to consider is that you can’t always treat every day the same. For instance, if you test Tuesday against Thursday and see that Thursday has the best open and click-through rates, you may have forgotten to add into your campaign that Thursday was payday, and this is when most customers have the most disposable income and are more likely to make a purchase.

Therefore, it is important to avoid any potential dates that might interfere with the results so you don’t get biased results.

What Data To Look For

There are three statistics that you really need to look at. The content you are promoting, and the goals of your campaign will depend on what statistic is key for your campaign monitoring. The three statistics are:

Open Rate – The basic statistic of how many people opened your email and read it. This is fairly simple, but more opens don’t always equate to more click-throughs or purchases.

Click-Through Rate – The number of people who read your email and then clicked on a link within your email. This shows that people are interested in your offer and want more information.

Orders – This can be measured in a variety of ways including:

  • Conversion Ratio – the ratio of subscribers who went on to buy a product/service.
  • Purchasing Value – The revenue earned from an email campaign.
  • Return on Investment – The amount earned compared to the amount spent.

Measuring these can tell you which campaign has been the most successful in converting customers. However, this can be difficult to measure as the landing page could be limiting sales and not the email.

Conclusion

Determining the best day and time for your email campaigns can be difficult for your business. You need to ensure that you study your email campaigns, test out which days are best for your business with split testing and then measure the results. This can be a lengthy process, but for the long-term benefit of your business, it is well worth the investment.

When was the last time you split tested your email campaigns? Do you know what day of the week is best to send your emails?

Let us know in the comments below.

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