Best time to send email: analysis and discussion

Mark Brownlow (who I don’t think is here in Ams, much to my disappointment) wrote a long assessment of how to determine what is the best time to send email. He walks through the questions and the data that a sender should evaluate when making the decision when to best send email.
I have previously posted about my views on the best time to send email. There is no one best time to send email. In fact, my experience leads me to believe if someone said the best time to send email is at 4pm on Tuesday afternoon then 4pm on Tuesday afternoon would rapidly become the absolute worst time to send email.
It should come as no surprise, then, that I really like Mark’s #4 recommendation.

4. Make the question obsolete
An alternative option to second guessing the best time of day to send out your emails is to do away with the question entirely.
Eh?
Control of timing becomes less critical to success where the recipient either determines the time of send for you (a concept also applied in the one-to-one model described above). Or where the recipient is determined to seek your emails out, irrespective of when you send them.

Send relevant email that recipients want and they will seek you out. They’ll create filters to put your mail in their “must read” mailboxes, they’ll add your sending addresses to their address books, they’ll actively look for your mail and exactly when you send the mail will become less of a variable in response rates.

Related Posts

Open Rate? Render Rate?

The EEC is pushing the term render rate to replace the term open rate. In addition to changing the name the EEC is attempting to standardize how the render rate is calculated. Loren McDonald, co-chair of the EEC Measurement Accuracy Roundtable posted his views on the discussion today. He presents 3 reasons why we should care about using render rate.

Read More

The overlooked secret of marketing

Seth Godin posted recently about the overlooked secret of marketing: time

Read More

Best time to send email: redux

Last week I wrote about a study classifying different types of email users. My point is that senders should be very aware of how their users interact with email, in order to provide the best user experience and the most revenue for the sender. If, for instance, the bulk of recipients are daytime (9 – 5 M-F) users, then the best time to email is different than if the bulk of recipients are all the time users of email.
At least 2 different people commented on when the “best” time to send email was, completely missing the entire point of my post. When you send email should be related to when your users are active in their email client. Senders know this, because they can track times when people open and click on links in the email. The data is all there, it just needs to be mined.
Plus, if every sender sent mail at the exact same time, that being the best time to send mail, then it will immediately become the absolute worst time to send email.
Pay attention to your recipients, and not to the internet experts. Listen to what your customers and recipients are telling you. Do what’s best for them, not what’s best for Joe’s Bait and Tackle Shop.

Read More