Today’s digital marketing requires personalizing the messaging and experience to meet the increasing expectations of each consumer. Making the step to personalizing emails can be done by leveraging available market tools and combining them with the basic information marketers already have internally or through third party services.
To prove customers should be targeted individually and not just segmented by demographic, the study discovered that:
Only relying on the simplest segmentation, such as gender, leaves marketers missing a large number of potential clicks and purchases, says the report. In addition to gender and income, the report says that time of day can be further optimized by incorporating purchase history, age and household composition as well.
Marketers looking to reach the largest number of customers in a one hour time period are likely to send at noon, reaching only a fraction of their customers. The study showed that 62% of customers had one single hour per day in which they preferred to click through an email message, digest its content and potentially make a purchase. This time varies from person to person.
Click Frequency (All Respondents) | |
Click Frequency | % Clicking Within |
One hour | 62% |
Two hours | 21 |
Three hours | 9 |
Four or more hours | 9 |
Source: Simple Relevance, August 2013 |
By using data to assess which hour of the day a customer is likely to open his/her email, marketers can ensure their message is at the top of the inbox at that particular time, says the report.
The study shows that men are likely to open email up to 21 hour time-periods per day, with the average number of time-periods being eight. Women opened email during as many as 23 hour time-periods per day, with the average number of unique time-periods being seven. While both genders open email regularly throughout the day, relevant content and individualized timing drive engagement and entice customers to click through. The majority of each gender chooses to click through an email within only one hour time-period per day.
While there is one major time-period in which customers will click through an email, marketers must acknowledge this does not mean that the hour will be the same for everyone. If an email is received outside of a customer’s preferred time period, the email will be pushed to the bottom of the customer’s inbox and the click-through potential for the email decreases – regardless of gender.
Click Frequency by Gender | ||
Frequency | Female Click | Male Click |
Ony one time period | 66% | 57% |
Two time periods | 19 | 22 |
Three time periods | 8 | 10 |
Four time periods | 4 | 6 |
Five or more time periods | 3 | 5 |
Source: Simple Relevance, August 2013 |
The report concludes by noting that customer profiles continue growing more robust, however marketers still find it difficult to apply data to offer individually customized messages and increase engagement. But, making informed decisions about how to market to prospects and clients encompasses the single greatest opportunity for almost any company to increase revenue.
For the PDF file of this report please visit Simple Relevance here.
Love this final comment regarding the report " The report concludes by noting that customer profiles continue growing more robust, however marketers still find it difficult to apply data to offer individually customized messages and increase engagement. But, making informed decisions about how to market to prospects and clients encompasses the single greatest opportunity for almost any company to increase revenue." If you are a marketer and want to take your entire strategy on segmentation,personalization & dynamic content assembly to the next level of relevancy, engagement and success..check out a company called Live Intent....these guys have got a toolset and solution that allows them to do the leveraging of all that data and drives better message assembly and relevancy...I wish I had this tool set when I was running several of the ESP's that I have in my career. There is no need to do this work yourself...Live Intent has a great solution
thanks, Al, jack