Marketing to Women: For Emails, Timing is Everything

The timing of sending email campaigns is equally as important as the content.  There are definitely some things you should learn about your consumers and their email habits.  Different categories and businesses have distinct patterns.  It is important to look at the patterns of your emails.

Some consumer products find Friday, Saturday and Sunday as the most important time – maybe coinciding with weekend shopping trips.  B2B marketers find mid-week as the most important days because Mondays are busy and Fridays are more focused on weekends.

The hour of the day that emails are opened is important as well.  You need to think about what your consumers are doing.  Between 5 and 6 p.m., they may be stuck in traffic.  Later in the evening, they may check their emails again.

Emails have the best result within one hour of sending.  That’s when more than 23% of emails are opened.  The second hour it’s 9.52%, the third hour is 6.33% and four-hour is 4.8%.   The open rate is nearly zero 24 hours after delivery of an email.

Mobile Email Opens

So, you know all those stats about women reaching for their smartphones first thing in the morning?   Based on an analysis of more than 150 million emails sent between August 2011 and September 2012, a TailoredMail study shows that 14% of all opens and clicks on a mobile device occurred from 6AM to 8AM. The second-biggest peak, at 12% share, occurred between 6PM and 8PM.  Not surprisingly, the third time was around lunchtime.  It makes sense, doesn’t it?  We reach for our phones first thing in the morning.  We may check emails at lunch when we are away from our laptops.  And then in the evening, we are checking our phones during commutes or when we get home.

Social Media and Emails

Some 57% of marketers believe that social media will affect their email marketing, according to a MarketingSherpa survey.  Some of the things to think about are making social sharing options easy to use, allow “likes” from the body of your emails, and integration of messages across social media to encourage interaction.