Created by Ryan Jenkins on
You're sitting at your desk working on your next great email marketing plan and you have a killer email all ready to go. You hit send and wait for the results to pour in. And you wait. And you wait some more. All of a sudden you start wondering, "Am I even reaching these people?" If you're not paying attention to your email marketing analytics the answer is probably... no.
Almost all email marketing programs today have some sort of analytics built into them to provide you with stats for your campaigns. They track everything from open rates, click throughs, and more importantly times that your email was opened. Now you may be thinking to yourself why is that more important? Pretty easy really, if you can find out when your emails are more likely to be opened/read your click throughs have a higher probablity to go up (of course that also depends on how good your content is...but that's for another blog post).
In my own experience I was working on daily and weekly campaigns. When I started the daily campaigns typically had a flexible send time as long as it was in the morning and the weekly send time was usually on Thursday afternoon. That's just the way it had always been so there was no desire to change that right away. Our open rates for our daily campaigns were slightly below 15% and our weekly open rates were typically between 17% and 20%. In other words, my open rates kind of stunk. I was writing good content but people just weren't opening the email. Grrr..
So in my search for a better way of doing things I stumbled across a screencast about WHEN you're sending your campaigns. From all the research put together they had found that the most ideal time for marketing campaigns to be read was early in the morning between 6 and 7 AM instead of in the middle of the business day like we were doing. Think about it, you go into work and the first thing most of us do is sit down and check our email or messages. We align those messages by importance and filter them throughout our day. You have time in your day at this point to entertain opening a marketing email and seeing what's inside. Compare that to later in the day when you're busy working on tasks or responding to in-house or client related email when you have no time to open a marketing email. You either archive it, delete it right away, or put it aside in the "I'll check that out later when I have time but then never do" folder.
Based on the research and looking at our own analytics we moved our send time for our campaigns to early in the morning (4 AM for our daily campaigns and 7 AM for our weekly campaigns). Tada! Our open rates jumped immediately. We started consistenting beating the 20% open rate mark and even topped off around 30% for some emails. Not to mention that our click through rates started climbing even higher too. We were reaching and engaging our consumers. The hard work put into the campaigns was showing results, and it was all in the timing.