You’ve heard the old saying, “mailing is cheaper than delivering,” all while marveling at the simplicity of an email campaign. With email marketing, you can take advantage of the powerful stream of words contained in an electronic message, sparing you the cost of printing, mailing, and delivering flyers and pamphlets.
But perhaps the best part of an email marketing campaign is the ability to target your audience and measure the success of your efforts. When done right, email marketing is an inexpensive yet effective form of advertising that can help you improve your marketing strategy and grow your business.
Since its inception, email marketing has become a popular and effective way to communicate with consumers. But many business owners and marketers are unaware of the science behind email marketing and how to ensure they maximize their return on investment (ROI). To that end, we’ve compiled an overview of the most optimal time to send out an email marketing message.
The Basics Of An Email Marketing Campaign
As a marketer, you’ll be familiar with the basics of a marketing campaign. You’ll have a specific target audience in mind, products you’ll use to reach that audience, and a set of metrics to measure the success of your efforts.
With an email marketing campaign, you have all that plus the option to segment your list based on criteria other than demographics. So if you have a marketing list that’s already been built with the goal of receiving emails from interested buyers, you can segment that list based on when they agreed to receive emails (e.g., immediate, short-term, or long-term).
Since the goal of an email marketing campaign is to gain subscriptions and/or purchases, your strategy should revolve around building brand recognition through content consumption. To pull this off, you’ll need to create compelling content that’s both relevant and interesting to your target audience. Ideally, your content will inspire your audience to act or to think in a particular way that will help you grow your business.
To get the most out of your content, you should consider creating bite size pieces that your audience can easily consume in one sitting. For instance, a podcast episode that’s fifteen minutes long might not sound like much until you consider that your target audience could potentially listen to it in their entirety. So you might want to consider breaking up your content into a series of shorter podcasts.
When Is The Best Time To Send An Email Campaign?
To put it simply, the best time to send an email marketing message is at the exact moment your target audience is most likely to listen to, read, or think about your communication. This is known as the “opinion gap” and it occurs when someone is exposed to an idea or product and doesn’t have enough time to process everything in their head before forming an opinion about it. The opinion gap can be narrowed with research, but it’s always best if you can prevent it from happening in the first place.
In marketing, we often look at the “opinion lag” versus the “opinion gap,” where the first is when someone perceives something about your product or service before the second. The lag occurs when someone is exposed to your marketing material but can’t recall it easily later on. This makes them less likely to take action or make a purchase decision because they need time to process what they’ve heard or seen.
Luckily, you can take advantage of the opinion gap and kickstart a conversation that leads to a purchase or an action. When you do this, you’ll find that the best time to send an email is when your target audience is most likely to act rather than when they’re most likely to think about your message. So, rather than sending out a general email blast, you can use email marketing to promote a specific product or service and track the results without having to resort to heuristic guesswork.
The Perfect Timing For A Product Launching Event
Another situation where the perfect time to send an email marketing message is determined is when you’re planning a product launching event. A product launching event is similar to an email marketing campaign, except with a major difference: your product is already known to your target audience.
In some cases, you might want to consider holding a product launch event even if your product isn’t ready for prime time. For instance, you might want to host a launch party for a new restaurant you’re opening, but the meal you’re serving isn’t quite up to par yet. In this case, it would be beneficial to host the event and get feedback from guests as to what you should change before the next serving.
You might also consider holding a product launch event if you’re looking to generate buzz about a new acquisition you’re making or a new business partnership you’ve formed. In these cases, it might not be beneficial to send out an email blast and hope that people show up to your event. Instead, you can consider hosting a webinar where you can discuss the details of your new business venture or acquisition in depth with interested parties.
Instead of using an email blast to promote your product launching event, you can consider using social media channels to drive traffic to your site. When used strategically, these channels can help you gain more traction than you’d get from a simple email blast.
Sending Out A Weekly Email Update
There are many reasons why you might want to send out a weekly email update, but the most effective one is when you want to keep your audience informed of the latest developments in your business. Consider sending out a weekly email update when you’ve got something new and exciting to tell your subscribers. You can also use these updates to introduce new products or services that you’re launching or to announce promotional events tied to particular products or services.
For instance, let’s say you’re a hair products retailer and you notice that a lot of your subscribers are discussing how to grow their hair longer on social media. With a weekly email update, you can bring those strands of social media discourse to your subscribers and engage with them on a personal level. You can also consider using the email to introduce a new product that enhances the way your subscribers style their hair.
Sending out a weekly email update is great because it keeps you top of mind when your subscribers are thinking about your business. You also have the opportunity to remind your audience of upcoming events or promotions you’re running.
When Is The Best Time To Retarget An Email Marketing List?
You might want to retarget your email marketing list if you’ve grown your list significantly and want to stay in touch with your audience, but don’t want to bombard them with redundant messages. Instead, you can use retargeting to send out promotional material that’s relevant to someone on your list. This is commonly done with product launches or other important business developments that pertain to your audience.
Say you’ve opened a wine store and you notice that your target audience is drinking a lot of craft beer. You can use retargeting to send out emails with information on the various craft beers available for purchase. You also might want to consider sending out retargeting emails after a big sale as an exciting promotion to get people coming back for more.
When done right, retargeting is a great way to get a return on your investment. But you have to consider how you want to approach retargeting and how to measure its effectiveness. You can hire a company to help you out with retargeting or do it yourself using tools like Google Adwords. We’d recommend the latter.
The Ultimate List Of The Best Days To Send An Email Marketing Message
Based on the reasons discussed above, we’ve determined that the best time to send an email marketing message is on one of the following days.
- A Monday
- An Tuesday
- A Wednesday
- A Thursday
- A Friday
- A Saturday
- A Sunday
Now that you know the best day to send an email marketing message, you can get in the habit of thinking about your audience and when they’re most likely to respond.