What Time Should I Email You?
Here is a great quote to remember from, Paul Talbot, a contributing writer at Forbes. He says, “There’s never a good time to send a bad email.”
How true!
Well, a while back, I wrote about My 3 Favorite Email Marketing Campaigns, and the concept of perfect timing came up on a discussion board. Perfect timing is a great tool that helps marketers deliver their email marketing campaigns at the right time. So, assuming you are not sending bad emails, how do you ensure you are maximizing your efforts?
Welcome to the World of Perfect Timing
Let’s delve in and understand what it is and when to use it. Obviously, you should use it (in most cases) if it maximizes engagement, but first, let’s understand what it is exactly.
So, what is it? Good question. There are actually two distinct concepts for perfect timing. I will talk about both of them in-depth but briefly, one idea of perfect timing sends emails out by each subscriber’s time zone and another form of perfect timing works by an algorithm that your email service provider calculates to send out the campaign at the optimal time.
In part one of this article, I am going to focus on explaining these two concepts. If you know about them, feel free to jump to the second part of this article. There, I explore the pros and cons of each and provide real scenarios and explain which option to use – and even cases in which you must never ever use perfect time!
Let’s Go Spanning the Email Marketing Globe
The first concept of perfect timing is time zone. The idea is simple, we live in a global economy with our customers spread out over multiple time zones. Therefore, when it’s 9 o’clock in the morning for me, it’s quite possible that it’s a different time for you – better yet, far more likely since I live in Israel.
So, in an effort to get emails in the inbox of your customers at the right time, many email service providers offer a feature that drips out your campaigns based on the customer’s time zone.
Many email service providers offer this feature. Mailchimp, for example, calls this Timewarp, while GetResponse refers to it as Time Travel. And then there are systems that allow this feature in marketing automation sequences or automated customer journeys, like Ontraport.
The other side of the perfect timing coin is algorithmically-based sending. This other aspect of perfect timing works towards the same goal: engagement. However, instead of “forcing” your campaign to be sent at a specific time based on your customers’ time zones, your email service provider runs an algorithm that predicts the best response time.
How does that sound? Does it help you solve your email marketing needs? In Email Marketing Musings on Perfect Timing, Part 2, I will breakdown use cases to use time zone sending, algorithmic-based sending, and when you should avoid – yes avoid – perfect sending at all costs!
