Perfect Timing

When should agencies send their prospecting emails to get the best results?

In 2020 PC (Pre-Covid) everyone seemed to agree that the best advice was to send midweek at midday – the Monday rush is out of the way and people are more likely to take a lunch break. But is that still the case? As many of us still work from home there’s no morning commute to catch up on last night’s emails, and lunch probably means moving from one room to another, if you take a lunch break – which you definitely should!

So with this in mind I’ve caught up with Kulea our marketing automation experts to look through our own data so we can share some insights into when people are opening, or clicking on emails from Street Agency.

We know that the B2B sector have data on this, but as agencies approaching marketeers, brands owners and digital contacts at companies and brands – we thought all our lovely agency contacts might like to see what is working particularly well for us and our agencies when leading new business campaigns!

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Why is this important?

Great question, you can write an amazing email full of beautiful prose or with the perfect emoji but if you’re hitting send at a time when your subscribers are busy, distracted or away it won’t be successful.

The best way to convert campaign emails into opportunities is to make sure you’re landing in their inbox at the perfect time. That sweet spot where the majority of your audience are free enough to pay attention to your amazing content and have time to engage with your call to action. 

What’s a great open rate and when do Street Agency get them?

If you’re only looking at email sends there are 2 key metrics, open rates and click through rates – let’s take a look at the open rate first, Kulea tell me that the industry standards are:

20% is good

30% great

40%+ is epic!

So, now you know what you’re aiming for when is the most popular day for people to open an email? We’ve had a look at our data and there are some clear winners and losers:

Surprisingly Monday also has a good amount of people opening our emails between 11am to 2pm but nowhere near as popular as Tuesday and Wednesday.

The wooden spoon day is definitely Friday, for whatever reason people don’t tend to open emails from us then – this could just be because we work a 4-day week (lucky us) and as we don’t schedule any sends for a Friday we’re not landing freshly into those inboxes. However, we do send a lot of emails out on a Thursday as it’s our busiest event day and that also doesn’t look like a popular day for people to open an email. 

Key tips to increase open rates

• Catchy subject lines – it’s easy to get carried away with these but make sure they remain relevant to the subject. You don’t want people to open your email then realise the subject line of ‘I’ve found your bank card’ was just a rouse to get you to open the email and then unsubscribe!
• Avoid emojis in the subject line, it’s likely to end up in a junk folder
• Make sure you’re sending emails to addresses that exist! We’ve all done it signed up for a special offer and ‘accidentally’ mistyped our phone number or email address so we don’t get spammed. By checking the quality of your email data you won’t have so many bounce and therefore negatively impact your overall percentage.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Do good opens always mean good click throughs?

The short answer is no.

Almost every campaign email you send will have a call to action, if it doesn’t then why are you sending it? The click-through rate measures people who have received your email and gone a step further than just opening it. They’ve clicked a link, or picture or downloaded a form whatever you’ve asked them to do next – well done!

When it comes to click through rates the industry standards are a lot lower, which is good because it’s harder, Kulea have told us the industry standards are:

1-2% is good

2-3% is great

3%+ is epic!

We looked at the data again to see if the popular open times are also the most popular times for someone to click through, and it’s not an exact match: 

What’s really interesting is that although Thursdays don’t make the top 3 for open times, people who do open those emails are clicking through between 9-10am so maybe all is not lost on Thursday morning.

Key tips to increase click through rates

• Quickly establishing a need for them to take the action you’re offering and be confident
• Make the call to action obvious a single hyperlinked word in a mass of text will get missed, even if it’s the only blue word on the email.

So what does all this mean?

It’s shown us that working habits have evolved slightly and midweek at midday is not always the best way (I love a rhyme). Plenty of studies suggest that the 9-5 is a thing of the past, and the data backs that up as we see a number of open and click-throughs Monday to Sunday at all hours of the day and night. Covid has given more people the freedom and opportunity to work flexibly around their families so people are more likely to work later into the evenings and weekends.  

It means that we have some pretty clear preferable times to schedule our campaigns to land in mailboxes ahead of those most popular times for emails to be opened or clicked on – which is great for us and can probably help you too. 

You can use this data to plan your own campaigns, it would be great to hear if your good and bad times match ours or if your audience responds differently. And, if you’ve already been brave and started emailing later in the day, or through the weekend to evolve with your audience we’d love to know if that’s worked for you.