Is There a Best Day of the Week & Time to send an e-mail newsletter?
Email is the ultimate marketing machine. It is virtually free, effective, response driven and trackable. In a perfect world, this direct response vehicle should have driven the Post Office out of business by now. Not so fast. They both have their advantages and disadvantages.
Email marketing is similar to direct marketing. To be successful at using email as a tool, you must consider what makes it so powerful in the first place. Just like direct mail, you can now target prospects by a variety of demographic and psychographic information. Cookies record your website visitors every move and furnish you with valuable information you can use to personalize your email marketing to be much more effective.
In order to understand when you should send an email newsletter, for example, you should consider who you are sending it to and the venue they will be in when they receive it.
There is an old expression in direct response advertising that states, when you’re writing a letter to someone consider that they are probably standing over the garbage can and sorting the mail into two piles, junk and bills.
Consider for a moment what the results might be of a random survey of companies to determine which is the best day of the week to mail an email newsletter.
They might say Monday, because it’s the first day they get back from work. But Monday, people might still be “hung-over” from the weekend, mad that they have to be back at work.
Or maybe Tuesday? Tuesday is a serious catch up day. No has time for emails.
How about Wednesday? Wednesday is a pretty nice day. If they don’t have anything to look forward to over the weekend, they might possibly read your newsletter.
Thursday and Friday might be OK for trivial pursuits, but not for serious work. Too close to the weekend.
The weekend? Forget about it.
To be successful at email marketing, consider who your market is and where they are going to physically be when your email arrives. Will they be in their office when it’s quiet or hectic, or will they be at home, late in the evening relaxing? Is your message meant as a B to B lead generation strategy or a regular monthly update to valuable customers or is it a must have product?
There are peak spam times like over the weekend and late at night when your prospects mailboxes are being filled with a whole lot of junk. You don’t want to be included in that do you?
The answer to these questions will help you determine what time of day and which days to email newsletters both to prospects and customers.
If you’re not sure of the answer, you could be missing out on a whole bunch of opportunities. That’s why, sometimes it’s better to outsource email newsletter production and implementation to professional email marketing experts like 190west.
There’s a whole science in determining the right time, correct day, graphics issues, copy issues and branding decisions that have to be made before you can begin to succeed at email marketing.
Newsletters need three elements to succeed in breaking through the clutter of spam and other emails. They need to sell, tell and entertain. That’s all there is to it, but it’s the mixture of the three that can become challenging.
Many of our clients allow 190west to handle their entire project from writing, developing and even mailing the emails to their customers. Some allow us to do bits and pieces. In either case they both realize that mistakes, branding errors and miscommunication can cost them time, money and image problems, and they really don’t have the time or in-house resources to this vital resource justice.
