THE EMAIL OPEN CONCENTRATED PERIOD
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.
_ Competing Time-Sensitive Newsletters: If your content is time sensitive, do you need to get your information in the hands of recipients before competing newsletters? Or does your content provide more analysis such that being first isn't why your readers subscribe to your newsletter?
_ Offline Media: Do you publish a magazine, for example? If so, do you want your subscribers to receive your newsletter before, at the same time or after they receive your print publications?
_ Peak Spam Waves: While spam arrives at all times, it seems that a lot of spam is sent during the middle of the night and on weekends. If you send late at night or very early in the morning, you risk getting lost among your recipients spam bloated inboxes.
_ Message Type: Most recipients of corporate newsletters expect to receive them during the heart of the business day, say 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. News-oriented newsletters are generally expected early in the morning with the previous day's news, or in the afternoon with news from the current day. The key here is timeliness of the information. Promotional and consumer ecommerce emails might be appropriate in the evening, on weekends or during the business day. It really depends on what you are selling and to whom. For example, an EmailLabs client has found that Sunday at 7 a.m. is the optimum "send time" for its mostly adult male motorcycle-riding customer
base. ACTION: If you aren't sure what the optimum open time is for your emails, test different days of the week and time periods. Make sure, however, that you test against a control group and that you measure not only open rates, but click-through percentages and Web site actions such as transactions and downloads.