email marketing frequency

When is the best time to send your email marketing?

It’s time for me to come clean.

Sorry people on my email marketing list, but for the past 6 months you have been my guinea pigs.

Whilst my email marketing may have come across as sporadic, inconsistent and out of control. There was method to my madness.

I was conducting an experiment to see when the best time to send my email marketing for maximum engagement.

Email engagement

When I say engagement, I don’t mean opens. Opens don’t really mean much, someone could just have your email open in preview mode but they haven’t actually looked at it.

Email marketing engagement is about click throughs and also if you’re really clever, setting up some goals in your analytics to check whether or not an email has made a sale, sparked a comment or an enquiry.

When is the best time to send?

If you google ‘when is the best time to send email marketing’ you will get a whole swag of results. Some people say Wednesday at noon, others say definitely not do it on a Monday, the responses are varied.

The reason why it varies so much is because everyone has a different target audience. Different strokes for different folks. Regardless of industry every single business is different, and therefore every marketing plan should be too.

What did I test for?

The three things I alternated were frequency, time & day of the week.

I started with weekly, went to fortnightly & tried a couple of monthly ones, went back to weekly and switched it up a bit. I made use of the A/B split testing within my email marketing system (Mailchimp) for the best time of the day to send, and also the best day of the week.

I now have a good idea of the best time to send my email, I am not locking it in stone, but I am putting it in a plan to review later on down the track.

Why it’s never going to be 100% accurate

A couple of factors come into play in your email marketing engagement success rate.

Your content is not the same every time. Unless you have a crystal ball, creating content that is going to interest all your readers all the time may prove difficult. So you can’t base your click through rate solely on frequency, time or days when every time you do a send it’s a different topic that resonates with different people.

How long you test for will also affect your results, for example, you can’t base your results on trialing one send at a certain time or day. You need to test it over extended periods of time.

Another factor is your list size. If your list is still quite small, AB test results won’t have enough data to accurately gauge the best time.

What next?

I was lucky as my list was quite new so no one had expectations of when I should be sending email marketing out.

If you’ve already got a system that works stick to it. Don’t mess about with it, people like routine and consistency.

If you find your engagement is quite low perhaps adjust it but don’t get all crazy like I did. Make slight changes and see how it goes.

Need help getting your email marketing to produce results? Get in touch.