• by Seana Mulcahy , October 10, 2005

Good morning, dear readers. Today I'd like to reach out and get your insights and advice. Putting together some recent client tracking reports, a colleague asked a question about open rates. She wanted to know the latest, greatest third-party stat on the best day to drop e-mail. She's done this a million times before, but on a recent test she noticed that many consumers were opening her e-mail on weekends.

My advice to anyone in the digital media and marketing space is to test. I don't care if it is SEO, paid placement search, e-mail marketing, online advertising, mobile or anything else; just test. Coupled with my colleagues testing, I figured I'd put on my research hat on a quest for stats.

In the recent past, companies like Return Path and eROI found that the best day to drop commercial e-mails was Monday. Monday drops also yielded the highest open rates. However, ExactTarget, just came out with more recent findings. The company found that there is no "best day" to drop e-mails. In addition, the best day to drop may not yield the open rates and conversions we seek.

Other ExactTarget study findings include:
--Wednesday Through Friday Maximize Opens. Starting in July 2004, the best days for maximizing open rates shifted to later in the work week. For the July through November period, Friday performed the best, but it was less than 0.5 percent ahead of Wednesday and Thursday in average open rate.

--Weekends Rule for Generating Clicks. Weekend results are mixed, with open rates performing slightly below average, but Sunday and Saturday yield the highest clickthrough rates. Since there's less competition in the inbox on weekends, people who open your e-mail have more time to actually read and respond to your message. So we know that 97 percent of e-mail marketers send e-mails Monday through Friday. Research from multiple sources said Monday was the best day. I wonder if too many marketers subscribed to that practice. Watching research open rates have shifted more toward midweek and Mondays are no longer a favorite drop day.

What about the weekends? Is dropping on a weekend completely unheard of? Would it make sense for a consumer brand? According to the ExactTarget study, Saturdays and Sundays yield clicks. Is it because consumers have more dedicated time online on the weekends? It seems this could be true.

Further findings break down information according to the type of firms sending e-mails. For example, high tech companies fared well on Fridays; membership organizations, on Wednesdays; online retailers drive twice the clickthroughs on Sundays

Certainly there is no rhyme or reason to the "best day" to drop. To me it seems more like a myth than a reality now. I can't say it enough. We need to keep on testing. There are so many factors that affect open rates and conversions. We need to really think about behavioral factors prior to investing in industry standards when e-mailing.

It's not rocket science, folks. If your team's findings show that there is a latency factor of a couple days from drop date to open rate, reassess your drop date. We all know inboxes are as cluttered as ever. As advertisers, we are constantly hoop-jumping to make sure we appropriately communicate via e-mail. We fear getting SPAM-filtered or even blacklisted. If we spend so much time in our creative, production and coding, why don't we spend more time in tracking and optimizing based on consumer behavior and activities online?

So tell me what you think. Do you subscribe to these stats when e-mailing, or do you follow your own tracking findings? What have you found while employing e-mail advertising for your brand or clients' brand? Post to the Spin Board and let us know.