In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, we gave you some email statistics and suggested a few strategies that might improve your open rates. Those were based around the time of the day, and as a recap it seems like it's better to send your emails in the evening and overnight instead of during the day.
Today we're going to give you a 12 month plan for when to send emails.
At the bottom of this email, you will find the links for the research we're using to write this Nugget. It comes from 3 different sources that we are boiling out the important conclusions for jewelry stores. Most of the data is quite general since it includes all emails sent throughout the USA. Where possible, we will narrow our conversation to "retail" statistics.
Let's first consider the best days of the week. The last time we carefully reviewed email data, the best day of the week for people to read them was Tuesday; actually, it was Tuesday at 1PM local time. We know from yesterday's Nugget that 1PM is no longer valid, and now the surprise is that Sunday is the new winner.
The data we are looking at is grouped into half-year segments of July-December and January-June. The results between the 2 halves of the year are compared.
For the last 12 months we see that Sunday is always the best day to gain email attention. At least 12% of emails are opened on Sunday, and at least 4.3% of the links inside an email are clicked on Sunday.
Emails sent on Saturday have fluctuating success. In the first half of the year you will have 11.6% open rates on Saturday with a whopping 4.9% internal link click rate. On the other hand, Saturday dropped to 9.9% open rate with a horrible 2.8% click rate for the second half of the year.
Without scientific study we can't be sure, but it certainly seems like Saturday success rates are based on shopping seasons. When comparing that to our own data from the Holiday 2009 and 2010 seasons, we know that shoppers are using their smartphones more on Saturday instead of their computer. While they are out on their Saturday shopping sprees emails are being neglected.
Because of the fluctuating Saturday trends, Tuesday is either the 2nd or 3rd most popular day to send emails.
The users of the MailerMailer service send more emails in March, April and November than any other months. This means in March every year your consumer emails have a lot more competition. The least number of emails are sent every year in July, May, January and August. September and December are both average months.
For you, our suggestion is to send weekly email notices in November and December to correspond to the current specials and Holiday gift suggestions. Then in January keep sending out weekly emails that do not sell, but rather tell customer stories. Good stories would be December engagements and reactions to unexpected jewelry gifts. Don't sell to your customers in January.
Then drop down to 2 emails in February and only 1 in March. Don't risk losing email opt-in customers because they were overwhelmed by the flood of March emails from everyone else.
Here's our suggestion for selecting which days of the week to send emails for your list. These are non-scientific suggestions based on our past experience helping jewelers with email and this current data.
From September to December:
1. Sunday early morning
2. Sunday early evening
3. Tuesday
4. Monday early morning
5. Friday early morning
From January to March
1. Sunday
2. Tuesday
3. Friday
4. Monday
From April to May
1. Sunday
2. Tuesday
3. Friday
4. Monday
From June to July
1. Sunday
2. Tuesday
3. Friday
4. Monday
Looking at this data, it really seems like you shouldn't have a set schedule for sending emails. We send out Nuggets at 2PM every day because that's when it's convenient for us. You have the option of reading them immediately, saving them, or eventually viewing them online.
For your jewelry store, this new data indicates you should plan a sliding scale for email sending for the entire year and throw out the set schedule.
Let us know how it works out!
Reference research links:
http://bit.ly/pGidtk
http://bit.ly/qyhp6d
http://bit.ly/phvCsS
