Commentary

Payday Strategy

One of the most interesting aspects of the presentation by Dela Quist, CEO of UK email specialists Alchemy Worx, was his take -- based on extensive testing -- on when to send out emails focusing on offers.

His thoughts:

-Never send out an offer in the second week of the month. This theory is based on what happens in the UK, but has relevance in the US.

In the UK, where people generally get paid once a month, their checks come around the 25th. And so over the next 15 days, they feel flush.

But by the second week of the following month, they begin to yearn for the next check, and their impulse to buy goes down.  

Extrapolation for the US, where people generally get paid twice and around the First and 15th of the month: Send emails on the payday weeks, but hold back on the weeks after.

-Sending messages in months with five weeks work best, Quist says. This is largely a UK-based conclusion: In five-week months, people get paid twice instead of once. So the two checks give people more confidence and willingness to spend.

Overall, Quist said about send timing, "The week of the month is probably more important than the day of the week."

But Quist is an evangelist for testing and suggests that marketers experiment with, and then monitor, which weeks of a month produce the best conversion rates for them.  

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