the best time to send an email

by Aaron Smith.
OK, I’ll admit it: The subject line of this message is a bit gimmicky. But I know you’re dying to know the answer to the eternal question: “What’s the best time of day to send an email?” It’s one of the most-asked questions in the industry, right behind “What’s the best day of the week to send?” and “How many emails should we send each month?”

As the outcome of a science experiment can be changed by the act of observing it in progress, the answer to this question changes whenever a theory on the topic is published. For example, once the industry came to a general consensus that the best time of day to send was early morning, everyone jumped on the early a.m. bandwagon, which quickly led to lower open rates, due to the deluge of messages. Shortly thereafter, some smart marketers started sending their messages in the early afternoon in a counter-programming move to grab attention.

Naturally, the perfect answer to the question is: It depends. But to give a more specific answer, from the subscribers’ perspective, the perfect time to send is just before they would like to view your emails. Some people like to view messages during their lunch break, some first thing in the morning, while still others typically wait until the evening when they are done with the workday.
The traditional method of scheduling email sends on most platforms is to load your message, select the subscriber lists and specify the date and time of launch (i.e. Friday at 2 a.m.) This approach sends to all recipients at more or less the same time without regard for when your subscribers might like to receive the mail.

What if you took a subscriber-centric approach instead?
Recipients are more likely to engage and respond to emails if they are viewing them when they don’t feel rushed and aren’t distracted by other tasks. Why not do subscribers (and yourself) a favor and send messages when they are most likely to respond positively?
Recently, a few ESPs have added the functionality to allow scheduling of email sends on a specific date, but with each recipient receiving the message within a targeted delivery time block based on previous open history or user preferences. I’m encouraged by this focus on subscriber preference, and predict we will see more platforms add targeted time-of-delivery functionality in the coming months and years.

Even if your platform doesn’t include such a feature, you can create your own simplified time-of-delivery scheme. Here are some guidelines:

1) Identify between two and four primary blocks of time. For example, early morning, midday and late afternoon/evening.
2) Segment subscribers by analyzing the open times on previous mailings. I recommend looking at a minimum of 10 opens per subscriber and segmenting based on the block of time they most frequently opened messages.
3) If no block of time is greater than 50% within a given subscriber’s open history, place that subscriber into a control segment along with any new subscribers or subscribers without enough open history.
4) Repeat the process every three-to-four months so that new subscribers can be included in your time-of-delivery segmentation strategy.

As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, I believe one of the biggest challenges facing our industry is overcoming the epidemic of too-frequent mailings and irrelevant messages. More and more subscribers are voting to tune out with the Spam button when messages are no longer relevant to them.

As my colleague Loren McDonald wrote in yesterday’s Insider article , the email consumer runs the show. Sending messages when our recipients want to receive them is just one of many steps we should be taking to maintain relevance in the eyes of the consumer. The more we can do to provide relevant information — how and when and where our subscribers want to receive it — the more successful our programs will be.

Source: MediaPost

'Powerful' 50-Character Emails Hit the Open Rate Sweet Spot

Email open rates tend to climb when subject lines are around 50 or 80 characters, but tend to middle out when the length is 60 or 70 characters, according to CEO Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx.

Quist made these statements during his keynote at MediaPost's Email Insides Summit Conference. He reportedly drew the research from 250 million messages and 660 subject lines. Clients included Paypal and Intercontinental Hotels.

50-character subject lines with a "powerful" offer were considered most appealing.
80-character lines or longer worked too, as long as the subject was described in an enticing manner.

Source: MarketingVox

6 Actions to lift open, clickthrough rates

Do you know what day of the week is best to send your email? Is Saturday a no-no day? What about subject lines -- how many characters can you use and still get the highest open rate?

We have exclusive new data on industry averages for click rates and best practices:
- How personalization affects open and click rates
- How to include product information and pricing in tags
- Bounce rates by industry What’s the most critical component of an email marketing campaign after the list? Subject lines. That’s the findings from MailerMailer’s new Email Marketing Metrics Report, which will be released next week.

“We are seeing the trend of open rates going down continue across industries,” says Raj Khera, CEO, MailerMailer. To contend with this, subject lines are gaining importance. “Shorter, personalized subject lines that contain your brand name consistently outperform everything else.”

When you look at the open and clickthrough rate findings, it’s the marketers who know what to offer and when to offer it that are the winners. In short, relevancy is everything.

Source: Marketing Sherpa


OPEN RATES BY INDUSTRY

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Welcome = Opened Emails

The Email Experience Council and the Direct Marketing Association announced the release of its second annual Retail Welcome Email Subscription Benchmark Study, examining the welcome emails of 118 of the top online retailers to identify best practices and benchmarks in the areas of merchandising, relationship-building, deliverability, and CAN-SPAM compliance.

Ramesh Lakshmi-Ratan, Ph.D., DMA's executive vice president and chief operating officer, says "... welcome emails have significantly higher open rates than regular emails...", while Kara Trivunovic, director of strategic services at Premiere Global Services, notes that "... emails should set the tone of the program... (and) properly executed welcome messages actually create anticipation in the recipient for the next message."

The report says, in the Executive Summary, that In 2006, only 66% of major online retailers sent welcome emails. With 72% sending welcome emails this year, it appears that more retailers are recognizing the value of these critical emails.

Instead of engaging subscribers with incentives and links to products, departments, loyalty programs, catalogs and other shopping-related material, a great number of the largest online retailers simply say hello and leave it at that. Though, in 2007:

• 98% of retailers' welcome email now contains a link to their shopping site (up from 88% last year)
• 33% contain store locators (up from 31%)
• 14% containing links to catalog information (up from 6%)
• 58% of welcome emails were CAN-SPAM compliant in terms of including both a mailing address and unsubscribe method, versus 52% last year

The study shows that 72 percent of major online retailers send out welcome emails, up from 66 percent last year. The good news, says the Summary, is that 61% of retailers deliver their welcome emails within 10 minutes of sign up, with most of those delivering within 3 minutes. The bad news is that 19% take more than 24 hours to deliver their welcome emails, with nearly a third of those taking more than a week to deliver. In the world of digital communications, that's an eternity to wait for a welcome email.

Other key findings from the study include:

• 32% of welcome emails include a discount, reward or incentive, down from 34% last year
• 62% of welcome emails asked the subscriber to white list them by adding an email address to their address book, up from 49% last year
• 79% of retailers sent out HTML welcome emails, up from 69% last. The remainder sent text-only welcome emails. That said, most of the HTML welcome emails were HTML "lite," making extensive use of HTML text.
• 53% of welcome emails included links to the retailer's privacy policy, up from 45% last year.
• 75% of the welcome emails include the retailer's brand name in their subject lines, on par with last year. Including branding here helps the subscriber recognize the email as one that they requested

Get more information or obtain the complete Retail Welcome Email Benchmark Study from the EEC Whitepaper Room here. Or, access the complete release at this site.

Source: Center For Media Research

Between the lines of your email sign-off

So are you a "sincerely" person or a "cheers" kind of guy? Or maybe you just sign your name -- or your initials. If you'd like to know what kind of person you are -- or at least how you may be perceived, click here for an interesting article.