Commentary

Your Email Is A Snowflake

According to the MarketingSherpaEmail Marketing Benchmark Report on the effectiveness of sending emails on different days of the week, there is no “best” day, or time of day, that works to send emails across the board for all email marketers.

But, points out David Kirkpatrick analyzing email research, looking at the results of this survey you can see a wide range of effectiveness, along with a few clear patterns. Tuesday and Wednesday look pretty good, but Sunday looks to be the least effective, says Kirkpatrick.

Daily Email Effectiveness (% of Respondents)

 

Effectiveness

Day of The Week

1 Least

2

3

4

5 Most

Monday

16%

21%

30%

17%

15%

Tuesday

3

7

29

35

26

Wednesday

4

8

32

34

23

Thursday

4

11

34

33

18

Friday

19

26

30

16

9

Saturday

39

22

18

9

12

Sunday

42

16

21

12

9

Source: MarketingSherpa, 2013

The reality, says the report, is that testing your email sends is paramount to effective email marketing. What might work for one industry, or business category, or maybe even your direct competitor, probably won’t work for you.

Your email list is unique to your business, says the report. In fact, your email subscriber list, says Kirkpatrick, is really a unique snowflake and ought to be treated as such with email send times, content and calls-to-action tailored specifically to the audience.

A case study, testing it’s emails prior to launching a campaign, segmenting to various job titles in the company’s database, found that the highest level job title segment (C-Suite, vice president and/or executive vice president levels) had the highest open rate, by a wide margin, on Sunday morning between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m.

If this collective experience chart had been the only guideline, those executives would have never seen those email sends. The company would have completely missed what turned out to be a golden two-hour window into the campaign’s target audience, says the report.

The lesson here is it never hurts to check out research on email timing, concludes the report. Those results can provide a great starting point when you begin a testing and optimization cycle on your email program. But nothing beats testing your list, learning something and then testing your list again – and again.

For more information from MarketingSherpa, please visit here.

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