One of the more difficult things with sending email marketing campaigns is knowing when and how often to send them. From newsletters to sale announcements and everything in between, it’s hard not wanting to send email after email hoping that the latest one you send is the one that helps you convert sales. Problem is that you’re not the only emailing your customers and odds are most of your emails are just either sitting in their inbox or have been moved to the trash.
There is no magic potion that shows you when you should be sending your email marketing campaigns nor how often you should be sending them. And it differs when you’re sending B2B or B2C emails. Email marketing is a Rubik’s cube of possibilities. Even if you match all the colors on one side another side could be completely wrong.
B2B Email Marketing
Again there is no magic potion that will reveal the best time to send an email, but when you know you’re dealing with a business, at least you know the business hours and their time frame. Here’s a tip to help you get the most out of your emails with B2B email marketing: never send an email on Mondays or Fridays.
Why you ask? On Mondays people are catching up from all the emails that came to them over the weekend and on Fridays, people are looking forward to the weekend and aren’t in a hurry to open your email. So that leaves just Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
People at work are typically busy. They don’t have a lot of free time to just be perusing emails in their inbox all day. You know they look at their emails first thing in the morning and more often than not they look before or just right after lunch. With that being said 9:30ish and noon time might be your best bet to get your email seen.
In the afternoon it gets dicey. People are trying to finish up their day so they can sit in traffic and contemplate their life choices as they inch down the highways and road ways. Let 3pm be the cutoff time for sending an email because any time after that is pushing it close to closing time and people aren’t really in the mood for new emails especially if their boss is flooding their inbox with last minute requests they could have brought up days ago.
B2C Email Marketing
Sending emails to consumers is a lot harder than sending emails to businesses. You know people look at their personal emails, but there is no rhyme or reason as to when they do. They have jobs, kids, pickleball matches etc. that consume a lot of their time and sometimes email is not a priority, especially if they’ve been staring at their work inbox all day.
With business email servers, you would hope, they have filters that send all the spam related emails to the trash folder so only emails from trusted sources flows to the inbox. With personal emails there is rarely such a filter unless the user sets up rules for their inbox. So that means all day spammy emails and junk fill up their inbox making your job even more difficult.
You really have a handful of potential times to reach you customer with your email marketing campaigns. You have the early morning when they first wake and hope right after they scroll through Instagram and TikTok they check their emails. You have lunch time, right after work ends and maybe an hour before they go to bed.
How to Make Your Email Campaigns Stick Out
Sometimes it feels like you have better odds at winning the lottery than your do having your email opened. And you’re probably right. I’ve always felt like email was like dating and your subject line was your pickup line. Corny pickup line and you can get reject quickly and there goes any chance of moving on.
Craft a clever subject line and hope that is the opening you need for them to open your email. Honestly the odds aren’t really in your favor because according to Statista, 47.3% of all emails are spam. Nearly half emails people receive are spam so if you’re trying to reach out to a potential customer it make take a few attempts to gain their trust. And having them decide to click to open your email is half the battle, yo Joe! (Old G.I. Joes cartoon reference)
Once you get them to open your email your design dictates what happens next. Either they click your CTA or they ghost you like your Tinder date did last weekend. Hubspot said mobile accounted for 46% of all open emails. That means you really have 10 seconds to make an impression because no one is going to scroll down page after page with your Shakespearean email.
And for the love of God don’t make your emails image heavy. No one is going to wait for all that to load. They have TikTok challenges to do and they don’t have time to wait for all your cutesy images to load. Get to the point and fast. Have a header image, some copy and your CTA. The rest is up to the user.
If you’re sending a newsletter then you can have more stories, images etc. because that is what typical newsletters have. But if you’re trying to get clicks to convert to sales you better be get straight to the point. No time for foreplay.
In Conclusion
Email marketing campaigns and when to send them is a never ending struggle. If it was easy everyone would be successful. And while everyone tries to reach people via social media, email is still the best medium to reach out to customers. There are no algorithms in email and if you’re still thinking social is the best way, it might be time to pivot to email marketing.
Remember email marketing is like dating and sometimes you have to change your approach a few times before you find that right match!