Tag Archive for: Email Marketing

When should you email for the best results?

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You want an answer to this question precisely to able to garner more open rates and more click through and get more traffic to your blog. The best times to send mail as well as the best days need some bit of thinking and looking into. Because you fully well know that your email list is your most loyal audience who’ll share your content once they read it, which creates the snowball effect of more and more – more traffic, more subscribers, more customers.

So, let’s start at the very beginning.

Best Email Send Time:
Some of the tips are widely accepted by the email marketing community. They are wonderful when you’re starting off, but please note that they won’t always work.
Daytime vs. Nighttime. While this one may really come across as an obvious one, it’s generally better to send out your email campaigns during the daytime. You know, when people are not actually asleep but quite awake.
Manic Mondays. The general consensus is that you should avoid sending out email blasts on Mondays. Why? People are already pissed off at the end of the weekend. When they see a barrage of mails, they would be more tempted to delete them than pore over them.

Weekends. Weekends tend to have low open rates, so most marketers avoid them like the plague.
Notify in advance about an Event. Statistics reveal that 23% of emails are opened within 60 minutes after being sent, but there are some lingerers who may not check out your email until a day or two later. To be safe, send out event-oriented emails 3-5 days prior to an event.

Favorites: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday have traditionally been favorite days to send email campaigns, as email marketers seek to avoid the Monday angst and Friday’s happy feelings.

Mid-Week, Mid-day: The tried-and-true traditional approach of sending out email campaigns in the middle of the week and in the middle of the day tends to do pretty well. General know-how suggests sending emails between 1-3pm (9-11am is recommended as well). It’s safe. It’s reliable.

The best time: Thursday 8:00–9:00 am
Most email marketing gurus and their articles would claim that 8 am is just about too early to send an out a mail, but it works great for quite a few of us – we get over 25% open rates with this time!
Think of the worst timing: Tuesday & Wednesday 8 – 10 am
While a lot of people would claim that Tuesday and Wednesday mornings should be great times to send emails, we’ve found that Tuesday mornings result in under 5% open rates, while Wednesday mornings have below 5% click to open ratios.
Your competition knows it too!
So we all agree in tandem that Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are the best days to send out an email campaign. But wouldn’t that apply to your competitors too? So this obviously means that you’re facing a ton of competition by sending out emails on the said days and times.
So think about it, although Mondays and Fridays are generally not recommended, who can claim that it won’t work for you?

What’s the choice of the device?
With customer habits changing like never before, the best know timings are being thrown to the wind. There is bound to be a huge difference in behavior between desktop users and mobile users. While the former will be just fine with mornings, the latter can check mails even late in the evening.
A study has showcased the fact that 55% of consumers open emails on desktops, while only 25% open emails on mobile devices. But with the evolving habits, these numbers are sure to change soon. And as businesses grow smarter and learn to craft more mobile-friendly emails, we’ll see greater email open rates on mobile devices.

Do you really know who you’re talking to?
Identifying your target audience and knowing what they want is the main point for you as a marketer. You should know your customers’ habits and cater to them.
And there is some interesting advice how demographics can override the safe “best time to send” advice:
The young, tech-obsessed crowd doesn’t have any aversion to checking emails at night. Evening emails could work just fine for younger audiences.
The defamed Friday could come across as a great choice if you’re in the entertainment industry, with your target audience looking for fun things to do over the weekend.
What if you’re audience resides in cold climes? Then Saturday and Sunday wouldn’t be off bounds at all to check mails or send them.
But in all this, please do not forget to consider your target demographics’ time zone – you definitely want to customize email send times depending on where your recipients live.

But the reality would still be that you would need to experiment with your send times to hone in on the exact best times for your own list. Every email list is made up of a different set of people with different habits. Therefore, your best send time may or may not be the same as another email marketer’s best send time.

The revival of email in the era of SOCIAL MEDIA

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With the influx of data from all quarters and social media ruling the roost with spends going up like never before, do you think email communication holds a remote chance to further your business?

 

 

The answer is yes, when it comes to doing business, email is the communication king. The amount of data around us has revived the age old form of emails and how! But that doesn’t really mean email communication is appropriate in every form and in every situation. A sophisticated, well-written email says a lot about your working style, while a poorly written, undecided communication can cause confusion and problems that lead to a loss of time and productivity. Even worse, it could harm your reputation.

Is Email always the right choice?
A vital part of using email effectively in a business setting includes knowing when it’s appropriate to send an email and when it’s not. Before you begin writing, think whether a face-to-face discussion or phone call would be easier in the long run. You might want to choose one of those options if your message is long and complicated, if the information to be imparted is confidential, or if the tone of your email could be easily misunderstood.

This has been a vehicle that’s been an inherent part of the marketing mix for over two decades. Studies have even shown that it is growing at a faster pace than leading edge channels like social and mobile. A lot of marketers have realized that emails are still the best way to re-target and reengage the target audience..

Email still rocks!
The fact today still remains that people have more email accounts than social media accounts. In fact, the number of purchases through email is more than that through social media messages. Also, a company trying to promote its brands through social media can find itself limited in its ability to reach the target audience. This is even after the audience has liked the company’s pages and agreed to receive its messages. Such limitations are not faced in an email.

There is a greater chance of your emails finding their way into a customer’s inbox than your social media messages getting viewed by those who have liked your social media page. Also, you can measure more clearly how successful your email marketing has been than how successful your social media campaign has been because at this time email auto-responder software possesses better analytics than social media.

According to research, actual marketing spending showcased direct mail as the leading channel among non-measured media. Marketers spent $43.5 billion on mail some years ago as compared to $41.5 billion on teleservices, $24.2 billion on search, and $23.4 billion on display ads.

How can you better your email open rates?

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Despite working towards gathering knowledge about the industry average open rates, you really can’t set a truly realistic goal for your email open rates without bench marking your current results! Though number crunching, data and figures may not present a very pretty picture for the creative ones in marketing, that’s one of the most important aspects that no one can afford to overlook.

All you need to do is follow these few and easy steps to identify ways of bettering your own email open rates:

Updation is imperative

Have you bothered to update your lists? Have you made sure is the emails ids are still up and about? Once you’ve cleaned up your contact list, you will realize that you’ve done yourself a huge favour. You not only know who your potential customers are, you have also managed to save a lot of time, effort and energy.
Writing mails such as, “We just noticed that you haven’t been opening our emails. Would you still want to continue receiving our promotions?”, will get an action from the customer. They will either opt out or hurry back in.

Get your contact list right
Imagine you are a baker and pick up your stuff regularly from an online store. Now if this store keeps sending you updates about home decoration items, wouldn’t you want to just unsubscribe?
Irrelevant mails can harm the business. So segmentation is really important. Make lists, make segments of your customers and get on with your mailing if you want them to open it at all.

Time to experiment a bit
Don’t shy away from A/B testing. Experiment a bit with your emails and test them. Create more than one look for the same campaign. Identify which one garners more interest.

Play around with the subject lines, images, creatives, language and figure out what works best with your customers.

Identify and analyze
Next, take a look at any outliers–good or bad. Did a particular email do really well, or really poorly? If so, do you have a theory about why it did better or worse than the others? Make note of each of these outliers.
Sit back and analyze a little more. A study has just thrown up interesting statistics such as 39% marketers reporting higher open rates with segmented lists.

Perfect your timing
Sending your emails at the right time is really important for increasing your open rates.
In general, send your emails between 8:30-10:00AM, 2:30-3:30PM, or 8:00-midnight. This will avoid the times when most people are cleaning up their inbox and more likely to delete your email without reading it.

Use some humor
Humor has a way of making a strong, instant connection with people. It’s personal, entertaining, and plays around in peoples’ minds for a bit longer.
And thankfully, you don’t have to be a comedian in order to pull off a humorous email. What’s more important is that you understand your email recipients intimately. If you know their likes and dislikes, it will be so much easier to pull off a joke, or insert a tongue-in-cheek reference.

So are you all set to increase your email open rate?
Start by measuring your email open rate, because frankly, that’s where it all begins. You know you have a great product and you are sure that what’s inside the email is valuable. So why leave any stone unturned in making.
These tips can help any campaign get better open rates, but don’t get discouraged if you don’t see a turnaround right away. Email marketing is an art and science, so give yourself some wiggle room to experiment and find what tactics work best for your business and your subscribers.

Now go right ahead and benchmark your email open rates using the tips provided by Sellosphere above. Then take a look at your industry average to see how you measure up, and set a realistic goal for improving your open rates.