EMAIL SEND DURATION - SD
Are you sending out 4,000 emails or 4 million? Depending on the technology solution or provider you use and volume being sent, it might take anywhere from a few minutes to many hours for your software or ASP solution provider to actually send the emails out to ISPs for delivery to the end recipient. ACTION: Monitor and understand this duration period and make sure you factor it into your calculations.
|
|
Are you are using an ASP solution or sharing a mail server with others in your company? If so, keep in mind that when you've pressed the send button your emails will go "in the queue" to be sent. If you schedule them on a day and time such as Tuesday morning (when a large percentage of emails are sent), your emails may be in the queue behind many other companies or departments of your company, and may take longer than you anticipated before they
are actually sent. ACTION: Understand if the "queue factor" applies to you and add this estimated time into your calculations.
Not all ISPs are created equal. Some ISPs deliver emails they receive immediately, while others may take an hour or in some cases 12 or more hours to process emails. Secondly, some ISPs utilize volume-based filters, so sending too many emails to a single ISP within a short time frame may cause your emails to be blocked - and sent to the ISP blackhole. ACTION: Consider sending test emails to seed email accounts with ISPs such as AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo and others that comprise 5 percent or more of your list. If one or more consistently shows a significant delay in delivery, consider segmenting those subscribers out and scheduling them for an earlier delivery time.
If you've followed this far, you now have a good understanding of all the factors that may affect email delivery and open times. So let's put the formula to work with an example:
In this example, through exhaustive research and analysis you've determined that the ideal time for your emails to reach all or a sub segment of your list is at 1 p.m. But for this to happen, you'll need to actually schedule your email to go out at 10:30 a.m.
Even if you don't take the time to undertake the analysis outlined above, at minimum you should do the following:
_ Put a stake in the ground as the ideal time you want your recipients to open their email
_ If you are sending a high volume of emails schedule your emails well in advance of the desired open time. If your volume is fairly low, then perhaps an hour or so in advance might suffice.