Digital Marketing has increased the speed, reach and ability with which we communicate with consumers (Chaffey, 2007; Salehi et al., 2012).  Included within that is email marketing which, although recently has been receiving bad press, is still arguably one of the most important areas of digital marketing particularly for building a relationship with the customer (Salehi et al., 2012).  Where social media enables a company to speak to consumers on mass, emails are private with the content only visible to the recipient. Ok the content may also be sent to thousands of others but there is a real opportunity to create a bond with the consumer through personalisation, something which just can’t be achieved through a Facebook post (Salehi et al, 2012; Clark, 2015).  Not only that, email marketing has many benefits for companies who maximise its potential (Purchannels, 2014).  Clark (2015) explains that the ROI (Return on Investment) can be as great as 4300% or double the ROI in comparison to other online platforms (Chadwick and Doherty, 2010).  So the opportunity is there, consumers do like to receive emails, after all they sign up to receive them (Chadwick and Doherty, 2010; Purechannels, 2014), but how do you know when exactly you should be sending them to ensure you get the best engagement, click-throughs and ROI?  It’s one thing having perfect content, subject lines and interaction but the email needs to be seen to be opened.

Chadwick and Doherty (2010) highlight the importance of consideration for the frequency and timing of emails. This really can impact the success of the email in engaging with the consumer. So what can we take from this?  To find out the best time for engaging with your consumer by email, trial different times to decipher which time of day/week lead to the greatest number of click-throughs and/or sales/registrations. This means rather than sending thousands of emails at once that you send them in batches, at different times of the day and week and then analyse the results of these batches separately.  Hopefully this should lead to pinpointing the optimum time to send emails for greatest engagement.

Here are some tips, adapted from Marrs (2014), to consider when deciding on the timings you’re going to trail for your email campaign:

1. Happy Monday – not quite. The consensus is to avoid sending emails to people on a Monday. The likelihood is that they will be catching up on things to do and organising their week so will not have the time, motivation or energy to be engaging with other emails.

2. Lazy Weekend – either out and about or at home and resting one thing is for sure that people will probably not want to be trailing through marketing emails. Weekends after-all have been known to have the lowest open rates for emails.

3. Advanced Notice – if your email is regarding a promotion for a set time be sure to give your recipients notice, just incase they don’t get to the email until a couple of days after it’s sent. Aim for 3-5 days prior to the promotion to keep everyone happy.  However, the only draw-back with this approach is that those who read the email immediately have to wait a few days before they can engage, which means they may forget or lose interest by that point. Again try both and compare the results to establish which works best at engaging with your consumers.

4. Midweek Maximiser – Tuesdays and Thursdays are reportedly the most popular days to send email Newsletters according to MailChimp (cited in Marrs, 2014). Whilst this may sound like a good idea, before you follow suit think about how you will stand out against all the other companies that are mailing on those days.  If you’re just starting out and want a safe bet maybe a Wednesday is the way to go with not the worst, nor the best results being achieved from emails sent on this day (Pinpointe, 2014).

5. Friday Feeling – so there are many that say avoid Friday, it’s wind-down time, no one reads their emails on a Friday and as such many companies rigorously stick to sending Tuesday to Thursday. So maybe Friday isn’t such a bad choice in that case; if there are very low volumes of emails sent on a Friday your email will stand less competition from others in vouching for reading time. Nothing ventured nothing gained, it’s worth a try right?

6. Tick-Tock – the jury is still out on the best time of day to send an email. This one really will come down to trial and error from monitoring the best engagement results in relation to the varying times the emails were sent (Marrs, 2014; Pinpointe, 2014).  Just remember not to put all your eggs in one basket, batched emails are your friend and will really help you understand when is best for engaging your consumers.

 

So we have a plan of working out the best times to email contacts but as with all marketing it’s not just this one key element that will lead to engagement. So remember to cover the following key areas, as well as the tips on the timing of your email, to increase the chances of success:

1. Personalisation – Use the recipient’s name if you have it. Tailor to their preferences or characteristics if you know them (Chadwick and Doherty, 2010).
2. Catchy subject line – Invite and tempt the reader to open the email (Chadwick and Doherty, 2010).
3. Relevant content – Don’t send an offer for baby clothes to a teenager or a clubbing weekend to a 60 year old, the chances are they won’t be interested and you’ll put them off engaging with future emails (Chadwick and Doherty, 2010).
4. The length of content – Customers want information to be as concise and to the point as possible to save their time. They probably won’t read through chapters of text (Chadwick and Doherty, 2010).
5. Interaction – Use of hyperlinks and embedded links behind images encourage click-throughs and further engagement (Chadwick and Doherty, 2010).
6. Mobile friendly – This is vital as a staggering 65% of emails are first opened on a mobile device (O’Dell, 2014).

 

There you have it the tricks of the trade to work out the best time to send emails and engage your contacts. Remember, send them in batches and monitor the engagement, who knows what you’ll find.  Dare to be different just because Tuesday to Thursday works for other companies doesn’t mean that you can’t trial sending emails on Monday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, you won’t know unless you try!  Good luck!

 

References

Chadwick, F. and Doherty, N. (2010) Web advertising: The role of e-mail marketing. Journal of Business Research. Vol. 65, No. 6, P843–848.

Chaffey, D. (2007) E-business and E-commerce Management: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. Third Edition. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.

Clark, B. (2015) Email Marketing: How to Push Send and Grow Your Business. [Online]. <http://www.copyblogger.com/email-marketing/> [accessed 12^th April 2015].

Marrs, M. (2014) Perfect Timing: The Very Best Time to Send Email Newsletters. [Online] <http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/09/04/best-time-to-send-email-campaign> [accessed 13^th April 2015].

O’Dell, J. (2014) 65% of all email gets opened first on a mobile device — and that’s great news for marketers. [Online] <http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/22/65-of-all-email-gets-opened-first-on-a-mobile-device-and-thats-great-news-for-marketers/> [accessed 12^th April 2015].

Pinpointe (2014) The Best Time to Send Email Campaigns. [Online] <http://www.pinpointe.com/blog/best-time-to-send-email-marketing-campaigns> [accessed 13^th April 2015].

Purechannels (2014) Email Marketing It Still Works (you just have to do it properly). [Online] <http://pca.cx/2E36A2?http%3A%2F%2Fpurechannels.co.uk%2Fblog%2F2014%2F12%2Femail-marketing-it-still-works-you-just-have-to-do-it-properly%2F> [accessed 12^th April 2015].

Salehi, M., Mirzaei, H., Aghaei, M. and Abyari, M. (2012) ‘Dissimilarity of E-marketing VS traditional marketing’. Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences. Vol. 2, No. 1, P510-515.