It is recommend to publish eShots on Thursday’s between 1 and 3pm, that’s very precise I hear you say!  There are variations on the theme detailed below. Most email marketing experts would claim that 8am is too early to send an email newsletter, but it works great for some with over 25% open rates with this time (according to MailChimp). 

Guidelines on best practise:

• It’s usually better to send out your email campaigns during the daytime, when people are awake.
• They say no to Mondays, people are tired and busy after the weekend with emails flooding in from work... Delete delete!
• Weekends tend to have low opening rates, so most marketers avoid them like the plague.
• Give Heads Up for An Event. While 23% of emails are opened within 60 minutes of being sent, there are some lingerers who may not check out your email until a day or two later. To be safe, send out event-oriented emails 3-5 days prior to an event eg a reminder for your workshops mentioning the ‘last few spaces’ etc…
• Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday traditionally have been favourite days to send email campaigns, as email marketers seek to avoid the Monday angst and Friday’s itchy-feet. MailChimp confirms that Tuesday and Thursday are the two most popular days to send email newsletters.
• Mid-Week, Mid-day: The tried-and-true traditional approach of sending out email campaigns in the middle of the week and in the middle of the day tends to do pretty well. General know-how suggests sending emails between 1-3pm (9-11am is recommended as well). It’s safe. It’s reliable. It’s not a bad choice.  MailChimp suggests 2 pm as the optimal send time based on their data.

Despite all of the rules above, the No. 1 rule of email marketing is "Test. Then test again." The only way to know for sure is to test various send times and subjects. Even within your mailing list, different segments may respond in different ways.

Start by following the "Midweek, Midday" rule, you should certainly get decent response rates. Then you can build on that by running some tests to investigate if there may be a more optimal time to send to your email list.  Just be sure you remember to keep track of what you sent and when.

At the end of the day, it’s all about how targeted your message is to the audience, how good the database is and having a compelling reason to open the email in the subject line and first sentence.

Measurement

Set up a spread sheet and measure each email you send out using the following criteria:

1. Email subject header
2. Issue date and time
3. Size of database
4. Name of database
5. Bounce rate (how many emails did not get through)
6. Unique opens (#)
7. Open rate (%)
8. Click through rate (#)
9. Click through rate (%)
10. Call to Action result (# that enquired/purchased)
11. Total Unsubscribes

All of above results should be readily available from your direct eMail provider’s system.

Good luck!

VB