Insights on the worst-day-to-send

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on January 11, 2007

Here's a little experiment I did on the worst-day-to-send your email.

My email marketing newsletter goes out every two weeks on a Monday. Has done since I started. The last one was slated for Monday, January 1st.

I can't actually imagine a worse day to send a B2B email on. First, nobody is in the office. Pretty much anywhere: it's like a near-global public holiday.

Second, when people do return to the office, they have to catch up with thousands of other things. No time to immerse themselves in new advice and information.

So I sent it anyway, simply to see just how bad things would work out metrics-wise. (This is the advantage of being a one-man independent operation. You can make stupid business decisions and not have to worry about criticism from above.)

My prediction: open rates about 50% of the usual, plus a slight decrease in CTR.

The actual results?

Well, first of all a whole slew of "Out of Office Replies" came in, which was quite interesting as you can learn a lot about people from those.

Second, very low open rates in the initial 24 hours. But...10 days later and here are the "final" results...

Average open rate of the newsletter over the last three months: 40.7%
Open rate of the Jan 1st issue: 38.0%

That's a fall of just 2.7 percentage points or 6.6%. Not ideal, but hardly the expected disaster. In fact, totally within the normal range.

Average CTR over the last three months: 39.5%
CTR of the Jan 1st issue: 38.9%

i.e. no significant difference.

So what's going on there? Any ideas? Keep those great comments coming.

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[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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3 Comments:

Hi Mark,

My guess would be, that you have a very engaged audience (wouldn't surprise me either!).

So even though they came back from holidays and had a ton of mail in their inboxes, they still took the time to check out your newsletter. Give yourself a pat on the back!
By Blogger Kelly Rusk, on 11 January, 2007  
 

Great experiment! I think you may have seen better than expected responses due to people getting a 'slow start' to the new year. Some times you need to take a break when you're going through all those piled up emails. A good newsletter is a great outlet. I'm sure the compelling content helped too!
By Anonymous Anonymous, on 11 January, 2007  
 

Thanks for the comments so far. My hunch was also that engaging content means people will seek your newsletter out regardless of how difficult you make it for them.

But the flipside of that is that if the content is so engaging, then the open rate per se should be higher. Which suggests perhaps there's a group of engaged subscribers and another group who don't care. The challenge then is to keep delivering useful stuff to the engaged group while finding ways to bring the other group back into the fold.

But I can also see the possibility that the year's begin is a good time to be reflective and thus people might simply be more amenable than usual to browsing an info-rich email.

Anyone have other thoughts?
By Anonymous Mark Brownlow, on 12 January, 2007  
 

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