I was thinking how to increase email open rates times and thought I’d experiment with our latest send to see how things changed through the day.
The send I tested was a B2B email following up on a recent survey with some of the findings from it, and a call to action to take some training.
Our usual send time is mid-morning but I thought I’d see what the differences were with a send timed around 8.30am for a change, so the emails were there when people arrived in work, and then around 1pm so they landed at lunch time. The sends were to 8 languages covering EMEA, so Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Poland, Russia, Turkey and the UK.
We looked at the open rates and found the early send had an overall open rate of 23% compared to the later one which was higher at nearly 27%. This was the same for most countries with some being very wide margins, Poland for example had an open rate of 16% for the early send and 27% for the later one. The only country that was lower was Turkey, which was less than 1% different.
The click through rate however was way lower in the second send, and this trend was the same across all the emails except for Polish, which was just slightly higher. So the second send had people opening it, perhaps because the second send arrived at an unusual time, but not clicking through. This could just be because people are simply busier at that time of day so anything like training was a no-go, or maybe the email and its message just wasn’t attractive enough to make the users click through. So, ultimately not that conclusive so far, but quite interesting nonetheless!
To add to the mix, I have also read about mail landing in the early evening becoming more popular so I think I’ll try the timed sends again when we have a product or a campaign launch so there’s a more instant pay-off and see how that one goes, and also span the sends across delivery times including a 5-6pm slot as well. To be continued…
Further reading
http://www.reachmail.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/ReachMail-Open-Time-Infographic.png
http://www.onlinemarketingtoday.com/marketing/improve-email-open-rates/
