EP. 63- BEST Time to SEND EMAIL Campaign? I Jay’s Scoop

Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that.

Here we are for another episode of do this, not that.

And today we're going to tackle a topic that I think every marketer's thought about at some point or another, which is what is the best time to send out your emails? Every time we hit send, we're like, am I sending this at the best time? Should I be sending it earlier or later?

And in general, there are two big issues I always have when marketers are trying to decide what is the best time to send out their email? Because what do we all do, right? We go to Google and we, we type in it. What's the best time to send out an email campaign?

It doesn't matter if you're a business or a consumer marketer. And then it'll come back. We'll spit back some results from some brand that gives you some stats or some whatever.

And the reason this bothers me so much is there's two issues with that. Number one, you're not a business marketer, you're not a consumer marketer.

If you are in the B2B, the business side of marketing, you are marketing into a specific industry and industries react very differently. And if you're a consumer to marketer, you're not marketing to all consumers. You're marketing to a very specific audience, right?

Do you think that owners of construction companies open up emails at the same time as healthc care professionals? Do you think that affluent investors open up emails at the same time as new moms?

The other big issue that I have with a lot of the data that floats right now out there, and I'm going to share with you some data that might actually be useful, is that when you get back the results of your Google search, what's the best time to send out email? It gives you a time, but your emails are not all the same, right? You have newsletters, you have offer emails, you have announcement emails.

And newsletters, for example, shouldn't be going out the same time as offer emails. We read newsletters way earlier in the day.

So this best practice information that circulates in terms of when is the best time to send out your business email or your consumer email is Garbage. So let me break down for you some of the things that you should be thinking about about the best times to send out your email.

Now, also keep in mind, some of you are using sophisticated email sending platforms that have something called send time optimization. If you don't know what that is, it could be great.

It basically uses all sorts of analytics to decide for every single individual in your database what is the optimal time that they should receive an email. And you may have this available on your platform. You don't even know it.

So you want to talk to your platform and say, do I have send time optimization available? And if so, you should test it. It works well for some marketers.

But let's assume we're all doing the standard, what time should I send out my email and what should I focus on? So let's first talk about some data that we're seeing from the last six months.

On the business side, first, let's focus on what I would call early riser industries. And this is how you have to think about it.

If the industry that you're marketing in are people that get up incredibly early, the education space, the home services category, hospitality. Right. Early riser industries, you want to be sending your emails out much earlier in the day.

You're looking at like 6am to 7am now, if you're targeting what I would call midday warriors, your best times, people like, for example, health care professionals, financial advisors. Right. And financial advisors, you may think they should be early morning, but our data says otherwise.

Cause really they're focused on the markets opening, but by midday they're like done. They already know what's going to happen that day from an investment standpoint.

So we'd put financial advisors in that midday warrior, but you have to think about your industry and who are they? Right. And so they're more of the 12 to 2 o' clock grouping. Now, on the consumer side, the key thing is generations.

Age is really the determining factor of when people engage with email. And basically it's in reverse orders. So boomers will check their email the earliest, then Gen Xers, then Millennials, then Gen Z.

That's kind of the reverse order of things. The older the audience, the earlier in the day, that's kind of what you always want to think about.

The older the audience, the earlier in the day they're going to interact with your emails. Now, the other things that marketers don't really consider is that the time of the day is also impacted by the day of the week.

What do I mean by that?

So newsletters for example, if you're sending out your newsletter, the best time to really send out your email newsletter for both consumer and business, generally speaking, Monday through Wednesday is 5am to 8am but as you get into Thursday through Sunday, we all kind of like edge a little bit later in the morning Thursday through Sunday, so we see newsletters performing better 8am to 11am so the earlier in the week is really earlier in the day. And for offer related emails. So now you want to make sure you're separating out offers from your newsletters. They're not the same things.

And in general offer offer related emails for both business and consumer do really well. 10am to 2pm but something to keep in mind is that we see bursts of performance that you should always be testing all sorts of crazy times.

I'll give you an example. Right now we're seeing Thursdays at 8pm do really well for B2B sales emails. Which sounds ridiculous, but the reason being is it lands in the inbox.

The person gets there Friday morning.

Generally we have a little bit of a clear schedule on Friday morning and we're seeing a lot of great response to sales emails being sent out Thursday at around 8pm on the consumer side, Sunday at around 2pm is working incredibly well for offers. So the moral of the story is test lots of different things. Don't rely on just one time. Don't apply that one time to the entire week.

And the other key thing is to benchmark yourself. Break out the emails that you're sending into buckets. Information related emails separate from newsletter emails, separate from offer emails.

And what is your best performance by each of those buckets. And the other thing to test is to not be sending your emails out on the hour.

And I've mentioned this before, but over 80% of all email is sent out on on the hour. What do I mean by that? When you set up your email campaign, what do you do?

You set it up for 8am, 11am, 2pm do you ever set up your campaign for 8, 22, 11, 19, 205? You don't.

But the issue is in the first 10 minutes of every hour, your inbox is flooded with just promotional email because we all send out our email on the hour.

So just by adjusting your send schedule and sending stuff not out on the hour, you'll actually see an increase in your overall email open rate by about 15%. It's the easiest, no cost way to boost results with the smallest littlest change.

So yeah, it's important when you send out the email, but you can't just apply, you know, one generic time to everything that you're doing. Okay, now, before we get into since you didn't ask, which is just the part of this podcast that is just bizarre all over the place, I don't know.

I want to let you know that this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. Now we have a special offer from Marigold, 50% off on their amazing service called Emma. Now you have no idea what I'm talking about.

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And it's not just an email sending platform, it's a loyalty platform as well. But right now, a lot of marketing budgets are getting cut. They're really tight.

And if you could save 50% on your email sending on one of the absolute best platforms on the planet, why would you not take a look? And this offer, this 50% off offer is only for listeners of do this, not that right here.

So where can you get more information about this 50 off offer from Marigold? You go to Jay Schwedelson. That's my full name, j a y shwettelson.com marigold and you'll get the information right there. It's a limited time offer.

This thing's going away in a few weeks. So if you want to save 50% off on your email sending, go to J Schweddelson.com/Marigold. All right, let's get on to. Since you didn't ask.

So the super bowl is coming up, which means I'm going to have to go to a Super bowl party. And I'm not happy about this. I'm not. So if you're out there and you're thinking about inviting me, don't invite me. I don't want to go.

Why don't I want to go? See, this is me. I'm not a very fun person. You might think I'm a fun person. I'm not a fun person. I'm just not.

Because everything kind of drives me bananas. Right here's what I can't stand at super bowl parties. The number one that I can't stand is the person who thinks they're an expert.

When you're sitting there watching the game and you're sitting next to somebody and they start rattling off, hey, do you know who the number one receiver is for this team?

And they start rattling off statistics because rattles right before they came to that person's house, they're like googling stuff so they could sound smart. I don't care. I'm not impressed. It means nothing to me that you know random stats. First of all, two teams I don't care about.

But being the random expert sports knowledge person is annoying. I. I've never left somewhere be like, hey, I was talking to Bill and that dude crushes it with his sports knowledge. We should hang out with him more.

I've never said that. Because that person, expert sports person is annoying. Okay, don't be that person. The other person that annoys me. Why does everybody annoy me?

I have a problem is halftime complainer. This bothers me every. You have the halftime show, right? And this year it's going to be Usher. Usher's super cool. I mean, he's awesome, right?

Usher goes out there and this dude's going to work his butt off and do everything you can to entertain everybody for 10, 15 minutes. And every time the halftime show ends, it's, oh, that sucked. That wasn't good. That could have been so much better. Oh, man, I really didn't like that.

It's like, relax, dude. I mean, this person's out there working really hard. It's not easy. And just enjoy yourself. Stop being the halftime complainer. Enough. Who. Who are you?

Why does this bother me? Why can't I just go to a Super bowl party bike? Hi, everybody. It's great to see you. I'm so happy to be here because I can't. Can't do it.

I don't know why I can't. Anyway, so, yeah, I don't. That's it. So thanks for being here. Oh my God. I go on rants. What's wrong with me and guru conference.com?

you gotta sign up for guruconference.com. if I mention this, the world's largest free virtual conference about email marketing. It's two days. I'll be there. It's going to be bananas.

Last year we had 20,000 people go to guru conference.com to register 100% for free. It's virtual. You should go do that right now. You're awesome. Thanks for being here. Talk to you later. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice.

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