There is evidence to suggest that the time of day and the day on which you send your email can have a significant impact on the performance of your campaign.

Email marketers have for some time bestowed the virtues of sending a campaign at 2:00pm on a Tuesday.  The logic behind this is that on a Monday morning people (particularly in a business context) have plenty of emails to get through, their inbox is slightly fuller and Mondays are also not (with certain exceptions of course) the best time to catch someone.

Move on to Tuesday; by sending at 2:00pm you miss the morning email clutter and hit their inbox potentially as they return from lunch.  So in this case by thinking about the habits and actions of your email recipients you have maximised your chances of an open and subsequent engagement by considering how and when they receive their emails and what sort of mood they might potentially be in when they receive it.

Research carried out by email marketing giant Mail Chimp supports this theory.  Their research indicates that most emails are opened between 2:00 – 3:00pm with more emails being opened on a Tuesday and a Thursday.

Now, there are two ways to look at this:

1. Tuesday and Thursday are the most successful days for sending an email as on these days more emails are opened.
2. Tuesday and Thursday are not great days for sending an email as these are the days that everyone else is sending theirs so it is going to be more difficult to stand out in the crowd.

Whether you glass is half empty or half full on this point the thing to bear in mind is that your email should be focusing on content that is tailored to the recipient.  They should want to read and digest your email content because it is interesting and very importantly, it is relevant to them.  If the competition isn’t relevant then they will read yours and not theirs.

The big no, no for sending a campaign remains to be on the weekend and you should definitely avoid sending on a Saturday or a Sunday.

The statistics that you gain from your email marketing should be there to assist you in making informed decisions on how to optimise and improve your performance going forward, whether this be in terms of what subject lines work best, what content is most popular and finally when you need to be sending.

If you have regularity in when you send, try changing your time of day or day you send to see if it has a positive or negative effect on performance.  If it does have an impact don’t just do it for one campaign; it could be an anomaly.  Continue to trial new things and you will be working toward what works for you and your recipients.

For more information on how MiHi can help get you started with email marketing or how we can improve your current performance please give us a call or email hello@mihidigital.co.uk

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One figure that will be of particular interest will be your ‘open rate’.  Now essentially this is the amount of people that open your email when they receive it, but there can be a little more than meets the eye here.

The open rate of your email is in fact the amount of people that open your email with images automatically enabled or click to enable the images on your email when opening.

This is because each email sent has a 1px X 1px square in the corner that is used to measure an email open.  If this square isn’t opened because the reader has not enabled the images on your email then it will not be registered as an open and therefore contribute to your ‘open rate’.

This means that your ‘open rate’ becomes a minimal figure rather than an absolute measure.  You can expect your ‘read rate’ (the amount of people that read your email) to be higher than your ‘open rate’ as some will be reading and viewing your content without enabling images.  As you can imagine this user is still engaging with your content and may click on links without registering as an email open.

For this reason it is always worth bearing in mind that your ‘open rate’ should be used and seen as an indicator of performance and not an exact measure.  When conducting A/B testing on subject lines it is for this reason also worth checking which email clients your recipients are using.

For example, Microsoft Outloook will default to not enable images when you send email campaigns.  For this reason if there is a disproportionate amount of users in your A segment with clients that do not enable images compared to your B segment you should factor this in to your results, particularly where testing indicates a close or massive difference in performance.

The majority of figures gained through your online marketing efforts should be used make better and more informed decisions in the future.  The open rate is no different, just be careful when using it in isolation as a specific measure.

For more information on how we can get your email marketing off the ground please give us a call or email hello@mihidigital.co.uk

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