It is a well proven fact that email is 007 when it come to the most important channel of marketing. It is one of the proven weapons which Marketers use for acquiring, nurturing and retaining the target customers. With nearly 91% of all US consumers in US opening email daily, email has taken over Facebook and twitter combined.
If you open your personal email inbox you will see a flood of emails from the hundred of companies trying to woo you with their innovative subject lines. Marketers have done a fantastic job with improving emails and have brought in amazing ideas to serve customers better and to measure the effectiveness. From a long time the focus was more on getting the subject line correct, using personalization, starting the subject line with the name of the customer, using PREFIXES, ACRONYMS, AND ABBREVIATIONS, use of urgency, offers, keeping it short and what not. Then came the era of Marketing automation where marketers started using rich media to catch that very second from the reader’s attention. Once the reader opens the email, he can see the excellent effort from a marketer to read the message as per his/her buying behavior, the use of pictures, rich media, apt use of Call To Action buttons, social media icons and colors.
But One place where marketers have not focused much on is the best day, time and the frequency to send an email. For B2C, it is not a big issue since the strategy use is to bombard the reader daily and whenever possible. But for B2B marketers it is a tough nut to crack and it is high time that marketers get it right. Because increase in even a .01% in Open rate brings increase in number of leads. So it is “important for marketers to give the target customer the space and visit the customer only during the visiting hours!”
Industry Case
In the name of nurturing and with high-end marketing automation tools, B2B marketers give a lot of focus on designing of an email or even testing or measuring the email. But they lose focus on when should they exactly press the shoot button. In one of my previous organisations my Manager asked me to do an analysis on last 1 year emails sent to find out what is the best day and time to send an email. When we did a thorough analysis on millions of emails sent and also on what the analyst are saying globally we found that “Wednesday and Thursday” at 4PM comes out as the best day and time to send an email. Also, Monday morning and Friday worst days for sending B2B emails (53% of marketers say Friday is the worst day for email open rates). But to our shock when we repeated the analysis after 9 months we came to know that Wed, Thu were no more the favorite days to send emails as the open rate declined. When we contacted some of the analyst they supported our finding and suggested that – as too many reports and analysis on the best day of sending emails published in favor of Wed and Thu, all the companies started sending the emails on the same day and time and this flooded the customers Inbox and hence Thursday 4PM was no more a good day to send an email.
This case clearly tells how much effort marketers are spending to get the formula right. As per a research done by ‘get response’ on best day to send an email they emphasize on Tuesday as the new Avtaar when it comes to the best day:-
Recently when i was interacting with a fellow marketer on an event i came to know that his organisation which is a leading IT MNC in US is breaking the rule by sending the email on weekends at 11 PM specially on Sundays. The target audience in this case is functional leaders and C Level executives. It makes a lot of sense since that is the time when leaders make strategy for the coming week and shift the burden to their directs :-). Also the competition is less and thus more chance of an email to get open. However, there is a great opportunity for a research to happen if weekends can be a good day for B2B marketers?
But there is a twist in the tail- The Global Data Privacy Laws. It is very important to check if you are even allowed to send emails on weekends or not. Global privacy laws are coming into pictures since the customers wants to make sure that they are not disturbed or contacted at off hours. For example, You cannot think of sending an email in Germany without the written consent of the reader. So if you have a marketing automation tool like Eloqua or marketo, make sure you enable it with the global privacy laws as per different geographies. This will save you from lot of crisis.
Strategy to get it right
- Do an analysis on the previous emails sent to customers and which day works best for you.
- Do not just blindly follow that the industry reports say.
- Observe who is your audience and what are their reading habits.
- Ask a research agency to run a test campaign on your behalf to the target audience in order to check the open rate on all the days with same content.
- Run a poll and ask your customer yourself when he is more comfortable in reading emails.
- Put an option on your website form fills and ask the prospect on the best day and time to send emails.
- And in the end TEST, TEST,TEST. Then REPEAT!!
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