What is the Best Time to Send an Email Campaign?

What is the Best Time to Send an Email Campaign?:

Take it from the reluctant Email Marketer, sending mass emails can be a crap shoot.

After 8 months of resistance and refusal to send email campaigns to Triberr members, I relented and started a Monthly Triberr Newsletter back in November of 2011.

Our open rates stink and I wondered why…

• Maybe it’s because our members are not accustomed to receiving emails from us. We’ll know after 6 months to a year, I suppose.
• Maybe it’s because we pre-publish the newsletter on the site inside our VERY active forum (we call it Bonfires for a reason )
• Maybe it’s because Triberr is kind of a weird platform and very effective at pulling people in. Once they’re in however, they are unsure what to do.

Maybe it’s a combination of all of that, but whatever reason it might be, our open rates suck monkey turds.

Or maybe our open rates are pretty standard, who knows. I really don’t have a good basis for comparison. So, you tell me.

Now the numbers only tell half the story. Our membership exploded during that month, so 22.3% in December actually means more open emails than November’s 30.1%

All in all, it ends up being 6 in one, half a dozen in the other. Despite the difference in % between the two months, the open rates are pretty much the same.

But they shouldn’t be. Not according to Email Marketing best practices.

You see, November email was sent on a Saturday morning around 9AM EST. The “good” period apparently. While December email was sent on a Wednesday around 5AM EST; the “abyss”” period to send emails, according to conventional wisdom.

It didn’t make much difference. The open rates remained pretty much the same.

I will keep experimenting with the timings. The January newsletter will go out based on the best timing as per research done by a Email Marketing company called Pure360. The infographics comes from them.

Source

What I LOVE about this infograph is that it helps you get into the mind of your target audience.

For example:

The 5-7PM period would be a perfect time to send an email entitled: Working Late? Try These 5 Time-Saving Efficiency Secrets

Or for the 3-5PM timeframe where users are receptive to life altering activities, something like: 5 Local Charities That Maximize Your Tax Return, might be a type of email that gets high(er) open rates.

As for Triberr newsletter, in January I will try the 12-2PM time frame next. Triberr newsletter is in fact news for Triberr members, so I hope they take time to explore news items by visiting complete posts. But who knows….we’ll see how it goes.

• What makes you open an email?
• What makes you ignore an email?
• What have you done to improve your open rates?