Email Newsletter Software and Open Rate Tips

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Do you know the best day of the week and time to do your business email marketing and send your email newsletter? Have you ever wondered if your fellow newsletter marketers are all sending at the same time you do? Convinced your open rate is too low or even too high?

Some recent stats may help you answer these questions: What Kind of open rates Are email newsletter marketers getting and what kind of email newsletter software are they using. If you are sending emails with HTML, you probably use your open rate to help rank the success of your newsletter campaign. Even though its not a perfect gauge of whether people are opening and reading your emails, its useful as a relative measure. If it goes up over a little time, more people are probably reading it. If it falls over a short period of time, its almost certain fewer people are reading.

Also, all other things being the same, it can give you some motivation or satisfaction. So, here goes Average Open Rate this past Month: 13.6% So when is the best day to send?

You will often hear that Tuesday is the best day to send, because on Monday people are busy from the weekend, and that on Tuesday morning you will have their undivided attention before they start into their work for the upcoming week. Do the numbers back up that?

Open rates by day of the week: Monday 13.68% Tuesday 13.22% Wednesday 14.08% Thursday 14.51% Friday 13.26% Saturday 12.08% Sunday 13.36%. Last month, Tuesday was the second-worst day to send, at least if you are measuring by open rates. I should point out this, too, the hour of the day that got the best open rate was not 8-9AM, or 9-10AM, but in fact 2-3PM Eastern Time ” email newsletters sent during that hour last month enjoyed a 19.1% open rate. Does This mean I should switch my campaigns to Thursdays?

Absolutely not if you already are distributing your newsletter. Do not break with your readers expectations just to try to follow the latest day of the week statistics. You might actually reduce your open rate by doing so. In both March and February, Thursday newsletters got the 3rd-worst opens vs. the rest of that week.

I hesitated a little to publish these stats, because I’m concerned that people might flock to sending their newsletters at the day or time that happened to get the best results lately. Please, do not drastically change your sending times/days just because you see that the average last month, or any month, happened to be higher on a different day or time. Yes, you might eventually be able to shift your sending schedule, or split test some broadcasts, but if you up and move everything, you may throw off subscribers who are used to hearing from you at the usual time.

To get at the other reason for not changing your sending based on these stats. If everyone switches their sending schedule to send on say, Thursday, then recipients will start getting a ton of email that day, and start paying less attention to each individual email and you still have a lower conversion. One possible reason for Thursdays success last month may be that it wasnt as popular as say, Tuesday or Wednesday for sending email: Percentage of Newsletters Sent by Day Monday 16.1% Tuesday 17.8% Wednesday 16.8% Thursday 16.7% Friday 15.3% Saturday 8.9% Sunday 8.9%

Those higher-volume days mean more emails in readers inboxes, which might contribute to reduced open rates. Following that reasoning, some people may look at the low weekend volume (more email newsletters were sent on Tuesdays than on Saturdays and Sundays combined) and see an opportunity to get their audiences undivided attention.

The main point in showing these stats is to point out that our assumptions about what works are often quite wrong, and that you ultimately have to test for yourself to see what best suits your recipients. Here is some inspiration and some help. Are you getting better open rates than this? Give yourself a pat on the back my friend, but do not get complacent. Open rates are not the be all, end all of email metrics and business email marketing can play a roll in actual conversions. They do not guarantee that people are reading your business email campaigns, only that they have images turned on and that they probably saw your email for at least a moment.

Some ideas that can help you raise your open rates: Ask people to add you to their contact list. Some business email marketing platforms will display images from senders who are in the recipients contact list. If you are putting pictures in your emails, use the ALT text for those images to pique readers interest in what the picture is, so that they enable images. Or directly ask readers to turn on images! Add a picture of yourself to your emails, near/next to your signature. People like seeing your smiling face, and if they see it in one of your emails, they may be more likely to turn on images to see it again later.