Explode Your Email List Responses
Foreword By The Editor
The following article is kindly included courtesy of John Desmond. It covers a component of email marketing which is rarely mentioned, at least in any detail. What is that component? Testing! Only by testing will you be able to determine the optimum time to get your message across. Thanks are due to John for his contribution.
Mike Alexander
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When Is The Best Time To Send An Email?
If there is one thing every email marketer wants to know, it’s the answer to that question. By the time you finish this article, you will finally know the answer.
You see, it is pretty obvious why this question gets asked so often. If we email marketers know when our audience is sitting at their computers, then there is a better chance that they will see our email. If they see it, they might open it, click on our links, take out their credit cards and buy our stuff.
So we need to try to find the sweet spot, that point when the recipient’s inbox is fairly empty, so that emails will be easy to spot. Maybe we want to find a time of the day when the recipient has a few minutes to spare. Perhaps we might look for a day of the week when it is likely our subscribers are sitting at their computers.
But for the most part, it is guesswork. And just guessing the best time to send an email does not put money in your bank account.
If you want to be certain about the best time to send an email, then you need to follow this simple two-step system
Step #1: Find Out When Most Of Your Readers Are Online
Do not guess! Instead, go to your traffic logs. Find out when your website is the busiest. And in particular, find out when most of the people on your list joined your list. If you can find a pattern where they joined on a particular day and approximate time range, then that is probably the best time to send an email.
TIP: If you have a global audience, then people who sign up for your list during their lunch break in London do so at a completely different time to those who join during lunch time in San Francisco. If you use a service like Aweber, you can segment your list by region, which allows you to more easily send emails with precision to a global audience.
Once you have determined when most of your audience is online, you can start sending emails out at that time. But don’t forget Step #2.
Step #2: Track And Test Your Results
Just because your traffic logs and autoresponder statistics suggest that most people joined on their lunch break does not mean that noon is the best time to send an email. Instead, you may find that your list is most responsive late at night, after they come home from work and the family is asleep. Or you may find that they are most responsive to your offers first thing in the morning.
The point is that finding out when your audience is online serves as a starting point. But ultimately, you need to test your list to find out when they are most responsive. That means creating identical emails, splitting your list, and sending your emails out at different times of the day (and even different days).
In short: Let your subscribers vote with their wallets. Tracking and testing is the only way to know for sure when your list is likely to be most eager to respond to your offer.
Summary
If you liked that tip and think it will put a few extra dollars in your pocket this week, then you’ll love to know about list-building secrets that will blast you into an entirely different income bracket!
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Tags: email advertising, email distribution, email lists, email marketing services, marketing emailsPosted in
