DOT- DESIRED OPEN TIME
Before determining when to send your emails, you need to understand when recipients are most likely to open your emails or when they will take your desired action. Let's look at four key drivers of "Desired Open Time" Recipients; Open Concentration Period; Environment; and Message.
Recipients - When are your recipients not only most likely to open your email, but take a desired action? Recipient factors to understand include:
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_ Business or Consumer Relationship: According to recent EmailLabs analysis, the majority of emails are opened throughout the day - about 80 percent between 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. (PST), with roughly 62 percent being opened between Tuesday and Thursday. Clearly most business-oriented customers are more likely to open emails during their workday, while consumer-based subscribers may open emails at any time. Though many people check their personal email accounts during the day, many do not, and so sending in the evening or on the weekends is clearly not out of the question when emailing B2C subscribers.
_ Time Zone: Do they live all over the world or mostly on the East Coast of the United States? People in New York, for example, (in my experience) tend to start work later and leave later than people on the West Coast.
Janet Roberts, editor of Ezine-Tips, which has subscribers throughout the world, suggests using The World Clock tool from timeanddate.com to help you understand when your emails will reach your recipients. Janet says, "we try to get Ezine-Tips out early enough in the day (U.S. time) so that we catch UK workers while they're still in the office." But with this send time, most of the Ezine-Tips subscribers in Australia are probably asleep. ACTION: If you have a significant number of subscribers all over the world, consider segmenting your subscribers according to major time zone periods - and schedule each segment accordingly.
_ Demographics/Psychographics: If you are reaching teens, then late afternoon when they get home from school is a good time, whereas homemakers might be most likely to open emails in the middle of the day. Many people may work in occupations where Internet/email access is either not available (i.e., construction, factory and restaurant workers) or time makes it difficult (doctors, nurses, teachers). Differences in sex could be a factor as well. While the gap is apparently closing, a higher percentage of males versus females are more likely to be
online during the prime evening television viewing hours. ACTION: Understand the composition and habits of your subscribers and identify the time period (or periods) that they are most likely to open and act on your emails.
_ This is the period of time - the first few hours after delivery - with the greatest concentration of opens. For example, in two recent issues of The Intevation Report, 37 percent and 38.5 percent of opens occurred within the first three ours of distribution. (I used the Open Histogram feature in our solution for this analysis.) The newsletters were sent at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. PST, and not surprisingly the email sent at 2 p.m., saw a much larger drop in opens in hour four - which would be 8 p.m.
East Coast time. So understanding this open concentration period is key to determining that ideal delivery time - and ensuring you maximize this initial "open burst." ACTION: If your technology solution does not have an open histogram feature, then simply monitor the number of opens every hour for the first 4-6 hours after opening.