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April 08, 2009
E-mail Tips - When is the best day to e-mail?
Think you know the best day and time to send your email newsletter?
Ever wonder if your fellow email marketers are all sending at the same time you do?
Convinced your open rate is too low (or amazingly high)?
Some recent statistics pulled from all AWeber users may help you answer these questions:
If you’re sending HTML emails, you probably use your open rate to help gauge your success.
Even though it’s not a perfect measure of whether people are actually opening and reading your emails, it’s useful as a relative measure:
If it goes up over a short period of time, more people are probably reading. If it falls over a short period of time, it’s almost certain fewer people are reading.
Plus, all other things being equal, it can give you some motivation (if your open rates are lower than other senders’) or satisfaction (if your rates are higher).
So, here goes...
Average Open Rate Last Month: 13.6%
When Is/Was The Best Day To Send?
Some people say on Monday people are just catching up from the weekend, and that on Tuesday morning you’ll have their undivided attention before they jump into their work for the upcoming week.
Do the numbers back up that theory?
Let’s see.
The breakdown of open rates by day of the week according to Aweber:
Monday - 13.67%
Tuesday - 13.21%
Wednesday -14.07%
Thursday - 14.52%
Friday - 13.25%
Saturday - 12.09%
Sunday - 13.26%
Last month, Tuesday was actually the second-worst day to send, at least if you’re measuring by "open rates."
Does that mean you should change to Thursdays?
Please, don’t drastically change your sending times/days just because you see that the average last month, or any month, happened to be higher on a different day or time.
Don’t break with your readers’ expectations just to try to follow the latest day of the week stats. You might actually reduce your open rate by doing so.
You might eventually be able to shift your sending schedule, or split test some broadcasts, but if you up and move everything, you may throw off subscribers who are used to hearing from you at the usual time.
So what is the best action to take?
If everyone switches their sending schedule to send on say, Thursday, then recipients will start getting a ton of email that day, and start paying less attention to each individual email.
Open rates aren’t the be-all, end-all of email metrics. They don’t guarantee that people are reading your emails, only that they have images turned on and that they probably saw your email for at least a moment.
Plus, there’s always room for improvement, right?
Some ideas that can help you raise your open rates:
-Ask people to add you to their address books. Some email programs will display images from senders who are in the recipient’s contact list.
-Add a picture of yourself to your emails, near/next to your signature. People like seeing your smiling face, and if they see it in one of your emails, they may be more likely to turn on images to see it again later.
-There’s a pretty good chance you’re not testing as much as you could, or even as much as you might like to.
Would you like to do more split testing and accurately build your subscriber volumes and your reader retention rates?
Many thanks to Justin Premick for the insider tips above.
We've been using the Aweber system for years and give it a great recommendation for one of the best sequential auto responders with top support and all of the tools you need are built right into it.
John Alexander
http://www.SearchEngineWorkshops.com
Posted by John at April 8, 2009 01:18 PM