Skip Fedura,
DMA Email Marketing Council
One issue that confronts all email marketing is the problem of timing. As with so many things in life, timing can be everything; the creative can be exquisite, the contact list immaculate, but if you contact potential customers at a time when they’re hurriedly flicking through a heaving inbox, or at a time when procurement is far from being a priority, all hard work will be undone in a crushing instant.
In spite of its importance, timing is not yet an exact science. B2B marketers also suffer a bigger headache than B2C marketers because identifying the right time requires consideration of a far greater number of variables. B2B email marketing demands an understanding of some general timing principles true for all campaigns, as well as an understanding of the factors that are specific to marketing to businesses.
Anecdotal and empirical evidence is slowly accumulating on general and specific factors, all of which provides a useful insight into the optimum times for contacting potential customers.
Morning
Most deskbound workers usually start their day by rifling through their email inboxes. Mornings allow email users to spend uninterrupted time reading and dealing with emails, but it is worth keeping in mind that they could be more focussed on the priorities of the day than your message.
Kath Pay,
DMA Email Marketing Council
Afternoon
Users tend to have more fractured interactions with email as the working day progresses. In the afternoon, users have more email ‘episodes’, but these are shorter in duration than the start-of-the-day episode.
Between 2pm and 3pm, users are likely to have five individual episodes of three-to-five minutes apiece, compared to the 8am to 9am period when they are more likely to have a single episode that is substantially longer.
On the face of it, this would appear not to work in the marketer’s favour, but your message may be the welcome distraction from an otherwise busy day.
Overview
Between the hours of 8am and 3pm, email makes up 30 per cent to 35 per cent of the average user’s media exposure.
This drops off during the late afternoon and early evening, only to peak again between 8pm and 9pm, as users return to their inboxes to wrap up the day.
Consider your customer base
The only way to decide whether morning, noon or night is the best contact time is to look at how your customers are responding.
One means of doing this is to structure a ‘time of day’ test where you send out identical content at regular intervals throughout the day and see which generates the best response.
Alternatively, you may already have this data from the email sends you have conducted over the past year or two.
If, like most brands, you have not been able to standardise the day and time that you have sent out your emails, you will already have this data – it just needs to be analysed.
The right time of year
It is important to understand the procurement frequency of the product you’re selling.
Different timing considerations apply to low-value and high-value products. Low-value products – such as stationary – are bought by companies throughout the year, so budget cycle considerations don’t factor into such procurement decisions.
However, when selling expensive IT systems, fleets of cars or any number of high-value products, you need to take into account when customers’ major purchasing decisions are made, such as at the start of the new tax year.
Understand the business cycle
The business cycle of your target market is also a vital consideration when identifying the optimum time of the year to engage with potential customers.
A key factor that affects this is customers’ peak sales time.
For example, from September to December retailers are focused on the build-up to Christmas; January, on the other hand, is the busiest month of the year for travel companies.
Your email marketing campaign should therefore always take into account when procurement is a low priority for target customers.
Don’t forget targeting
Even if you take heed of this advice, your email campaign could be a wasted exercise if your emails are not relevant to your readers. Marketers can spend a lot of time and a lot of money to find the perfect time of day to send and optimising their subject lines and templates.
This will make no difference, however, if the recipients are not opening your emails because they are not targeted or timely.
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EMAIL MARKETING: Creative – 05-01-2009
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