Email sending tips: Sometimes you hear of people talking in their sleep…but I have yet to come across anyone who reads emails while sleeping.
So, why is it then, that so many people fall into the trap of sending out emails at times when their target audience won’t see them.
In at least one particular sector of the online advertising community it is common for program owners to send out emails at midnight.
Most people are already sleeping at that time, or at the very least winding down for the day…so they will not want to read your message and chances are it won’t be seen at all.
So the answer is…wait until they are awake and time the email for then – sounds obvious but so many people don’t do this.
The good news is that at RocketResponder you can choose exactly when your emails are sent out. So if you have a broadcast message you want to send to your list you can either send it immediately or send it at a date and time of your choosing.
Here are some good times to send an email to your subscribers:
- immediately – when the message is time critical and you need to get it out there now
- day time rather than night time – more people will open an email during the day than at night
- want to catch the early openers? – then sending an email between 7 and 9am will ensure the message is near the top of their inbox when they are checking messages
- afternoons are great for getting your email opened – studies have shown that between 2 and 5pm is a particular sweet spot for getting your emails opened.
Also, in general, weekdays tend to get more opens than weekends and you may get a better response mid-week than on other days.
Top tip: Just be aware that different times can produce different results to be prepared to experiment a bit and see what works well for you.
Great tips, definitely going to track more what I do with my broadcasting times and avoid (a bit) sending important stuff on weekends.
Sergio
Just experimenting with different times can be interesting.
Obviously it is all the more tricky when you have customers in many different time zones.
Top tips! Never even about some of them. 🙂
cool sltuff – put them to good use and crush it with your emails!
So is RocketResponder going to give us the option to find out what time zones our subscribers are in?
And why did you send me the email about this blog post while I was asleep?
🙂
Time Zone suggestion is an interesting one…does anyone else think this would be a useful addition to the service?
Good food for thought and good stuff to consider, but since (as Jon is often prone to repeating at TE Live) our online advertising community has truly become a global community, and more and more these days I’d even call it hyper-global, I’m not sure it really matters so much these days unless one knows for sure you have a mostly-US-only (or mostly-Asia-only, or whatnot) subscriber list.
While I’ll allow that probably a fair majority of my target audience is in the US or UK, I also know I tend to reach a fair amount of folks in Australia, New Zealand, and many parts of Asia and Eastern Europe. With that in mind, it *is* actually better for me to mail at midnight in the US than it would be in the US daytime.
That said, I generally do mail fairly early, but even in the previous paragraph’s example of US vs UK – even between those two, there’s at best six hours’ difference, and if I hoped to reach a lot of people in “prime time” in the UK and Western Europe then again, I’m better off mailing in the middle of the night my time.
All of THAT said – yeah, for the most part, I probably am better off trying to target mailing time for “prime daytime hours” in the US and the rest of North America, but I still experiment a little here and there and I’d definitely recommend to anyone, especially those in the US & UK, experimenting with different mailing times and seeing what works best.
I think too the mailing subject may be even more important to the argument than anything else. Given the huge popularity of PTC and related topics in Asia and relevant time zones, if there were, say, another launch along the lines of Legacyclix or DrClix, I might prefer to target those time zones and send in the evening from the States. With other kinds of launches (like Trackery.me or a new traffic exchange or whatever), then yep, I’d probably go for daytime hours in the US.
As for weekends, I’ve pretty habitually avoided them except in very rare circumstances for years now as they rarely seem to get much response vs. weekdays – both in list mailing as well as, say, safelists/mailers/etc. Unless there’s something really major going on, I don’t generally mail, use safelists/mailers, or blog on the weekends.
Hi Lynn,
You make very valid points indeed.
Clearly with a global list you have to make a decision about when to send in the knowledge that the timing will be better for some than for others.
The main point though is to give the matter some thought and then decide what is right for you and for your subscribers.
Clearly you have done so and if we can encourage others to do the same then great!
I’ve actually received much better open rates in evenings, and also some types of offers perform better in the morning while others will perform better at night, it greatly depends on the audience.
Have you been testing this yourself or is this just information you read somewhere? Try sending a few emails on the evenings or weekends and you’ll be surprised by the result.
Yes John you are quite right as evenings can be great too. The main point of the post was to get people to realize that the timing of sending emails does matter.
There is never any need to press send and hope for the best. As you quite rightly point out it is important to know your audience and act accordingly.