Marketing Email: The Right Day at the Right Time

By Madison Jacobs

Part 4 of the “4 Reasons Why Your Emails Aren’t Opened” series

Welcome to the final part on a series of posts on the 4 reasons why the marketing email you send to your list aren’t getting opened by your subscribers.

In part 3 of the series, I explained that emailing dead accounts may be the reason you are seeing low open rates from the emails you are sending. People tend to change their email addresses every few years so you have to make sure you have other ways outside of email set up to remind people to keep their information up to date.

In this post, I’m going to cover about the 4^th reason why your marketing email may not be getting opened – you are sending emails at the wrong time of day or on the wrong day altogether.

The Wrong Day and the Wrong Time

When people are faced with a full email inbox, they tend to make liberal use of the delete key. If you are sending emails at a busy time of the day or on the wrong day for your audience, your open rates may take a hit.

Here are some statistics from Experian, the global leader in providing information to organizations and consumers on commercial and financial decisions, around the best days and times to send emails to your list:

According to Experian’s Q4 2012 Quarterly Benchmark Study, Monday has the highest revenue per mail (good to know if you are promoting the sale a specific product or service), but Friday has a high click through rate (important to know you are trying to get some really important information or content across).

Believe it or not, Experian also reported that sending emails between 8:00 PM and 11:59 PM and midnight to 4:00 AM proved to have the highest response rates in all areas, yet also had the lowest percent of email volume. So, when you are sending important messages to a smaller group of people, consider sending them at the above times. Try to avoid really busy email times like the beginning of the work day, lunch time and late afternoon just before dinner. You don’t want your messages getting lost in the mix.

Lastly, Experian reported that emails sent on Saturdays and Sundays had the highest open rates, unique clicks, transaction rates and revenue per email, yet have the lowest volume deployed compared to other days of the week. This supports the idea that the more targeted and segmented you can get with your email messaging, the more effective your email marketing strategy will be.  Sending several smaller groups of emails versus a large, blast email to all of your subscribers will produce better ROI in your email marketing efforts.

When do you find to be the best day and time to send emails? Let us know in the comments!

How do you craft the perfect marketing message?  Follow the tips in Infusionsoft’s “Anatomy of an Email” to get the best message out to your target audience.

This post Marketing Email: The Right Day at the Right Time was first published on the Big Ideas Blog.