What is the right time
The right time to send your newsletter is when each recipient is most likely to engage with your email. One’s is said to be engaged when opening your email and doing the action you were expecting — buy an item, book a ticket, download an app, etc.
We do know that people spend more and more time on their smartphones. A recent study from Adobe actually revealed that outside of work, Americans most commonly check their email while watching TV (70%), from bed (52%), on vacation (50%), while on the phone (43%), from the bathroom (42%) and even — most dangerously — while driving (18%).
Now being able to reach people via email more easily doesn’t mean you will engage them at all times though. If one’s receives and opens an email when driving, this person is less likely to click through and purchase whatever offer you pushed, whereas if this person is at home, chances of engagement are immediately higher.
Why sending at the right time
Email marketing is tricky. In order for a campaign to perform, a lot of parameters need to be aligned. Let’s say you create the best email ever, it’s beautiful, the content is great and will definitely be relevant to your subscribers. You have no doubts this email’s ROI will go through the roof. But it doesn’t.
Why though? Sending the right message is important, people are asking for good and valuable content, yes, we all agree on this, but it’s not enough. You can have the best message but if you send it at a random time — and at the same time to all your recipients —, you will not maximize your campaign’s performance.
Also remember your inactive subscribers? The ones who didn’t open or click on a singe email you sent for the past 6 months? You believe they are not interested in your newsletter anymore and you are probably thinking of unsubscribe them to have better campaign statistics, but what if you were just sending them emails at the wrong time?
How to find the right time
Unfortunately, there isn’t any magical time of the day to send your emails, it doesn’t work like that. Also do not rely on industry averages telling you when open and click rates are better to find the right time, this would be taking the problem the wrong way.
What you need to do is look at your subscribers individually. Hopefully you’re not alone on this one, technologies have been built and are now here to do that for you. It will analyze each recipient behavior in order to identify individual engagement periods. It can be between 7–8AM for someone and around 3PM for someone else.
Using those data-driven technologies allow marketers to message individuals when they are most likely to engage. Each email is delivered at a different time, based on each recipient past actions on your emails. No more mass mailing, emails are sent one by one in order to arrive at the best time in each recipient’s inbox. All you need to find the right time is behavioral data.
Source: Medium