Email Marketing : Timing is Everything
Email Marketing : Timing is Everything
Email Marketing is an inexpensive way of communicating with customers and prospects. Depending on the crowd that you are targeting, there are certain ‘tricks of the trade’ you may wish to employ in order to have recipients be more open and responsive to your message. The timing and frequency of your messages are key contributors to whether your campaign will result with much success in attaining sales or driving your message agenda.
Which days and hours are best?
Business recipients respond best to messages received between 11am and 3pm. This is because sending your messages earlier may result in a lower open rates due to the morning rush in the office. You would want your messages to appear in their inboxes at the most convenient time for reading, right?
These messages should be delivered between Tuesdays to Thursdays. From our observation, Monday is an extremely busy time for decision makers who often have many meetings to attend. People tend to leave the office early or take leave on Fridays. In most cases, people have already mentally ’switched off’ by Friday.
Consumer recipients respond best to messages received between 5pm and 8pm because most of them would have reached home and are more interested in ready their personal emails.
Consumers spend more time online from Friday thru Sunday, and thus have more time to consider your offers if you send weekend messages. Moreover, you would want the reader to have no work distractions when being exposed to your marketing message as it may just result in reduction of your click-thru rates on the newsletter or email offer.
Buzz your audience!
Attaining a good campaign response is all about how much buzz you generate from the marketing content. A good newsletter or email offer should consist of a few elements:
Do not hard sell in the introductory email. It often requires up to 7 exposures before recipients feel comfortable enough to consider buying from you. Aim to educate your readers about your products and/or services instead.
Use interesting and legitimate lures to get readers to visit your website where they can get to know about other products and services you offer.
Call to action!
You should follow-up with an email message within 2 weeks after the initial offer. We have witnessed that click-thru rates are higher in follow-up messages. You should not wait too long to follow-up because your audience would have already forgotten about your original offer and your opportunity to close the sale disintegrates.
That’s it for now. All the best for your campaigns this week.
Mark Claudius Png is an Email Marketing Lobbyist and CEO of ShoutLabs. He spends his time having coffee with customers to improve their experience.
