From the course: Marketing Tips

How to increase email open rates by improving timing

From the course: Marketing Tips

How to increase email open rates by improving timing

- [Instructor] Hey, and welcome to another episode of Marketing tips. I'm Brad Batesole, and this week I'm going to leave you with a method to increase your email open rates by improving the time that those messages are sent. Now we all do it, we send a campaign, then we refresh the report, impatiently waiting to see how our open rate looks. When often times it can really take a day or more to see the true results of the campaign. But, how do you boost that metric? Well, first you need to take timing seriously. It's way too easy to send campaigns when it's convenient for you. But if you're intentional about sending it at the optimal time for your readers, well, you'll see significant improvement. First though, you need to ignore all the commonly shared rules on when to send email. You might have seen reports that say "Tuesday at 3 o'clock" is the best time, but all of that data is blended together. And your customers may not even perform anywhere close to that average. So, you should be doing your own analysis. Now, for starters, many email tools have features built in to handle this. Mailchimp for example has a feature for optimal time analysis, and this is going to try to optimize the send time based on your user data to increase your engagement. Now this is great if you're using Mailchimp, but even Mailchimp's data may be a little off. So the next step is to try and deduce the best time, and you can do this by thinking about your customer. Who is your audience? What do they do with their day? Why would they read this email? You can take this information and start to think about when your consumer might actually be interacting with their email. You'll start with a hunch, and then you need to build your own timing test. To do that, you'll need to start by splitting things up. Now you're going to need to limit the number of variables that you're testing, so a project of this nature can take some time. What I recommend is you start by picking the next two emails that you'll be sending. You'll take Email Campaign A and you'll split the list right down the middle. You'll then give half that list the email on Monday morning, and the other half on Tuesday morning. Or you may decide that your hunch is that the afternoons or the evenings are better. Then, the next email campaign that you send, you'll split that list in half, and do Wednesday and Thursday. And you might follow this with Friday, Saturday, Sunday and so on. Then you'll look and see which days seem to resonate and then you can go back and do this test with the same day in the morning, the same day in the afternoons, the same day in the evenings, and so on. Then, you'll look at all of that data and aggregate and see if you can draw out any patterns. The more data you can capture and analyze, the better. Now consider, however, that you may have cohorts of users that can all perform differently from one another as well. And when it comes to that level of granularity, you're best off using powerful marketing automation software that can adapt down to a specific user. But, for most cases, doing a simple test like this could help you inch out maybe five or ten percent improvement on those open rates, which could have a significant impact on your ROI. Thanks for checking in this week! As always, I'd love to hear from you. So, follow me on Twitter, via @BradBatesole Or connect with me on Linkedin. And let me know if you have any other questions about email optimization. I'll see you next week

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