This past Sunday (at 3:04pm), which if you’ll recall was Easter Sunday, Hubspot sent an email to their subscribers, titled “Happy Easter! Stop Hunting for Inbound Marketing Knowledge,” which went on to promote one of their upcoming conferences.
Fuzzy Logic?
Email content aside, sending a marketing email like this on a weekend holiday is a very risky thing to do. While it’s doubtful that Hubspot saw many unsubscribes from their email marketing campaign, because they do provide some great info
., the adjectives that probably came to the minds of their readers might include: intrusive, cheeky, overly aggressive, intrusive, etc. How many people thought, wow, those guys are just awesome for remembering to tell me Happy Easter? Probably none, since the main purpose behind the email was strictly marketing.
But what Hubspot did isn’t unique, so we can’t totally blame them for being insensitive. (Plus, if you really didn’t want to be bothered, why open email on a holiday anyway?!) The idea behind this “science-of-timing” based marketing approach is about rising above the sound of incoming, competing emails for one purpose only: to make sure your email is read.
Science of Timing Approach
To do this, “science-of-timing” experts are telling merchants to email-market to internet users at the “contta-competitive” times. For example, it has been suggested that email campaigns go out early in the morning. The reasoning behind this may be because subscribers have likely already gone through the previous day’s email and will be able to process the one you sent without being simultaneously bothered with having to deal with a full day’s worth of other emails to0.
General Suggestions
It’s also been suggested that marketers schedule email campaigns on weekends because nine-to-fivers will be checking personal email during this time. However, the caveat here is that subscribers are more likely to report marketers for spam and unsubscribe if those weekend marketing emails are annoying in the least. In terms of frequency, it has been advised that marketers can feel free to send quality information as much as a couple of times a day, and those who unsubscribe would have done so anyway; kind of a “the more, the better” approach.
Final Answer
To finally answer the question posed in the title of this article, Is there really a “best time” to schedule email marketing?, we would have to say: It depends. Not that there’s no truth in these aforementioned professionally recommended “science-of-timing” email strategies, but it really pays to take the advice in a step at a time, and remember that what might work for one industry may not for another. So please, don’t suddenly start scheduling all your email campaigns on weekends, holidays, early mornings, or definitely not everyday. But do experiment re-timing your email campaigns a little at a time, IF you’re not reaching your goal conversion rates.
Feedback Request
We would love to hear your feedback on the subject, so please post your thoughts as a comment to let us know the best time you’ve found to schedule email marketing campaigns.
