Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Ginna,
We definitely do Wednesday for monthlies. First Wed of the first full week to be precise.

Generally first thing in the am...though we have sent some late Tuesday night. Late night e-mails often get kicked as spam, tho.

Response is consistently good...but again, you have to have good content. When customers start looking forward to receiving them...you're in good shape.

Michael

Ginna,
Mid-day mails generally donot follow the spam route and 'day' is more important than 'date'.
rgrds
Atif

Hi -
We have great results with Thursdays. They go out through our cart so it is usually very early AM.

I'm not too sure about a convention, but by first hand experience I can tell you Tuesday is the best day of the week to send out any email promotions, and second Best would be Wednesday. We've tested this, and found there's a huge difference in response rate on Tuesdays.

And it's reasonable as well.

On Mondays, you are burdened with all the e-mails received during the weekends, and planning out the weeks work. But, towards Tuesday you have cleared most of your inbox stuff, and you are more open minded for reading emails popped into your inbox.

For monthly's, it's best to choose the first Tuesday (or Wednsday) of the month, unless if the date it 1st, or 2nd.

Talking about the time, it's better to time it after your target audience settle inside his office, but before the noon. That's approximately, around 9.30 to 11.00 am. If you send it too early, there's a chance that your mail to be ignored, among many other emails that they see when they first login to the mail client.

But, if you time it after the target settles in his/her office, the chance that you get his/her attention is higher.

Doesn’t this approach rather depend on the average tendency of the recipient to bin a newsletter, rather than open it and then read it on any given day of the week due to other or external factors which make them more or less inclined to read or not read your production? That doesn’t say a lot for the impact of the newsletter nor does it say much about the logic of “Choosing a day / date / time / Star-Sign on or in which to send it! Come on, your worth more than that and so is your newsletter.

Let’s look at the flaws in the logic: Fridays are out because it’s the end of the week and everyone is fed up, wanting to go home. Really? Try asking Sir Richard Branson to email them on a Friday offering them a directorship and see if they open and read that!

Monday’s are out because people need to clear their desks and their inboxes from the accumulations of a week’s junk. Surely Thursdays are a bad idea because any serious email sender will have reasoned that as they can’t send on a Monday or a Friday, then sending on a Thursday will be useless because you are only going to compete with quality and that’s tough. Wednesday is out because of all the people who will have rejected Friday and Thursday will have therefore decided to try on Wednesday, which will crowd you out. Tuesday is presumable a no-no due to people still being stressed at having to clear their desks on Monday, attending to the fall-out of things which weren’t done over the weekend and mentally steeling themselves for the fact that tomorrow is the busiest day for people to send emails on (Statistically). Looks like there’s no day on which you can send a newsletter then!!

If you are that worried, why don’t you write to them, by hand, in a nice envelope, using a fountain pen? They will be so surprised that they will not only read your newsletter, but hire you as their next Marketing VP.

Best wishes and do it any old day – it’s only generalised statistics which state that email volumes and openings are on a curve peaking on Wednesday and finishing on Friday at a point which is usually lower than Monday. It doesn’t mean that it’s better to send on a given day or that recipients are more receptive on a given day. It’s just numbers!!


Steve Alker
SalesVision

Dear Ginna,

Amitha (AmSam) has some excellent advice for you on timing, so I will not repeat that portion. What I would like to add is that the timing of your newsletter will also depend on the nature of its content.

Also, check to see if a majority of your users have subscribed using their personal email addresses. In that case, perhaps sending your newsletter on the weekend might be a better idea.

Of course, in case you have a big enough subscriber list you could also use split testing to figure out exact results on what works best for your newsletter and audience. That answer would be a hundred times more valuable than any conventional wisdom we can give you here.

Hope this helps.

Clive Fernandes
Clive Fernandes Consulting

Though as noted above by many, conventional wisdom says no Monday or Friday, it might be an interesting experiment to go against the grain once or twice to see the results. For example, send on a Friday morning or something. Compare results to when you followed conventional wisdom.

Email marketing is well suited for experimentation.

As for time, a lot of email marketing seems to happen during the day but who is your audience and when are they likely to be reading their email?

In the B2B software world (and in the UK if you want to read anything significant into that) I ran a test a couple of years ago which I've stuck with for running monthly newswires.
Send it Friday lunchtime, when no-one else does, then when your targets get back from the pub, your news will be at the top of the pile to read while they're winding down towards the weekend. Personally, I tend to sift through my email newswires on Friday pm too though unfortunately I don't often get the time to go to the pub...