Re: Scheduling e-mail campaigns for consumer consumption

From: Janet Attard <attard_at_businessknowhow.com>
Date: Mon 28 Jul 2003 10:47:25 -0500

>Are any members aware of any reliable resources to identify at what time
>of day and on what day of the week an e-mail campaign to consumers is
>read/opened?

Business Know-How has been sending email newsletters for many years. The
market we target is small business owners and anyone interested in
marketing, managing employees, and various business concerns. Our
newsletters have always been written with headlines and teasers aimed to get
people back to the web site, and in recent years, have included ads from
sponsors and other advertisers.

Although that's not a consumer market, we, too, find it important to gain
some information on when newsletters are read, and when is the best time to
deliver them. The only way I've discovered to really make that
determination for our own audience is to watch the stats on web traffic, and
watch the stats on clickthroughs on the newsletter itself, and on individual
articles and ads. We've only been able to watch the clickthroughs on the
newsletter since last September, when we switched providers for newsletter
delivery and started publishing the newsletter in html.

What we had always seen by watching the site log statistics, was that
traffic on the web site increases dramatically on the days we send a
newsletter. It starts increasing within minutes of the newsletter going out
and stays higher than non-newsletter days throughout the day. So we had
always figured that the newsletters, because they are opt-in and expected,
were getting read by a lot of people pretty soon after they hit their
mailboxes.

Since we have been able to track newsletter clickthroughs, we've found
pretty much the same thing - with the highest response on the day we send
the email, and a fair number of people clicking through for several days
after. So, the majority are reading and clicking through within a week.

But, what I had always suspected, too, was that just like people clip ads or
articles from printed publications and put in a drawer or folder until they
are ready for the information, the same appears to be true for newsletters.
We get people clicking through a month or more after the newsletter was
delivered. I just looked, and we had people clicking through one of our
earlier trackable newsletters up to 8 months after it was first published.
Now, mind you there were only a few, but it's interesting that anyone holds
onto the email for that long before reading it.

Time alone isn't the only influencing factor, either. The subject line makes
a tremendous difference in how many and how fast they open the email. And
unfortunately, ridiculous spam filters that either block all mail coming
from blocks of IP addresses, or that look at words in an email and mark
email as spam based on some numerical or other system can drastically change
results. Sending an html newsletter that discusses email marketing,
increasing your sales and controlling spam all in the same newsletter, along
with a link to opt-out - all normal subjects for a business newsletter
[sigh] - can get a newsletter blocked or marked as spam, so fewer get read.

I would suspect, that there would be different trends for different
audiences, and types of email sent. If your target is teenage consumers,
you probably wouldn't start getting responses in minutes of sending the
email if you sent it at 9 am, for instance during the school year, or if
your market is consumers who don't use computers daily. But the only way to
know for sure would be to test and watch your own statistics.

--Janet Attard
Author, The Home Office and Small Business Answer Book
Run, market, and grow your business with help from Business Know-How
http://www.businessknowhow.com







Received on Mon Jul 28 2003 - 10:47:25 CDT