We’ve all had the big internal debate: When is the best time to send an email message? If last minute changes push you outside of your normal send window, when’s the next best time to hit send … do you have to wait until Tuesday of next week? Today, we’ll examine the concept of Send Time Optimization, and how it can drive better results for your email campaigns.
To begin with, let me state that Frantz Group is an agency partner of Silverpop, a premier marketing automation provider. They’ve provided a tongue-in-cheek look at what the worst times are to send emails out. Not to spoil the entire slideshare, but the key component to the presentation is that every day and time will be bad for someone on your targeted email list. Feel free to run through the slides below, if you’ve been executing email campaigns in the last 2-3 years, I’m sure many of these statements will sound very familiar to you.
To help counter that situation, Silverpop tracks individual behaviors around emails that have been sent and interacted with. While a message promoting a time sensitive webinar may be best delivered 24 hours before the event starts, many other promotional and blog topics are an educated guess. By tracking response times and click-through activity, the software is able to determine the optimal interactive moment in which to deliver messages to particular contacts. When you decide to enable send time optimization on your next email campaign, you are able to select which type of optimization is preferred for your audience (day of week or time of day). If you choose time of day, you simply schedule the blast to occur on a particular day, and then the messages are delivered within a 24 hour window of that start time, in what has been determined to be the optimal interactive time for each contact, based on their prior marketing behaviors. This process works best when applied to an email audience that you’ve built up a decent rapport with, and have allowed some time to measure these interactions on prior deliveries.
We all know that there is no longer a “bubble” behind email marketing performance. To be successful, you first have to get noticed. The best way to get noticed in today’s very busy email inbox is to have your message delivered at a time when your prospect is most likely to be present and engaged. From there, your helpful and creative subject line is actually read, if it intrigues the prospect, they open your email, if your calls-to-action are relevant, they engage and click through to your website.
As an agency partner of Silverpop, Frantz Group has very affordable options for organizations to start using marketing automation solutions without massive up front commitments. Our marketing foundation offerings allow your digital marketing processes time for refinement and development, as well as the ability to grow within the tool kit, rather than worrying about features you may be paying for but not using. Feel free to contact us to learn more, or request an overview of our inbound assessment, which can help guide you through how your inbound marketing processes are working, and what gaps may exist today in your environment.