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One of the most asked questions in email marketing is - When is the best time to send out my emails?

In this article you will find out exactly what is the best time of day to send an email to your customers.

The perfect time to send an email is just before your customer wants to read it.

It may seem obvious, yet few e-marketers attempt to do it, settling instead to send within the current 'best send times' guidelines.

The advantage of paying attention to when your customers want to read email is that you get their undivided attention, great open rates and an even better return on investment.

Getting your messages into customer Inboxes at the best possible time for your customers, requires some simple analysis and segmenting or some clever technology.

Clever Technology

At the moment there are only a few Email Marketing Services that give you the ability to distribute your current mail out based on the individual email open history of each of your customers (for customers without an open history the mail out is sent at a predetermined time in a large batch).

Without technology to make it easy to send emails out based on every individuals preferred time, the task seems enormous, but here's a way you can get started while you wait for the technology to come to you.

Time Chunks

If you look around your office, or just think about when and your friends read email, you'll recognise that there are different blocks of time during the day when people view messages. Some people like to start the day with a coffee and email, others wait for their mid-morning tea break, some enjoy catching up during their lunch break, while others finish the work day and when it's quiet go through their email.

The important thing here is to realise that there are blocks of time during each day that people set aside to read through their messages when they're not feeling stressed and pushed for time or distracted by things they need to do.

Getting it Done

By looking at the open times from previous mail outs you'll discover that your customers have preferred times of day to open their messages, and that you can loosely group these times into blocks - such as early morning, lunch time etc.

Once you've identified two or more blocks, you can set them up as segments within your email mailing lists.

Next, take a look at the open history for your individual customers. You want to look at a minimum of 10 opens so that you can see a trend, then put the customer into the segment that corresponds with when they most frequently opened their emails.

For customers who don't have enough open history and new customers with no history, put them into a separate segment that gets sent at the same time as your time block segment with the most number of customers in it.

Once you've got your segments in place, you can confidently schedule your mail outs based on time, so that your customers get your messages right when they want it.

To make sure you keep getting great results, sort through and review what happens in each segment regularly.

Whether you choose to stick with the 'best send time' guidelines or start looking at getting your emails in Inboxes at the right time, by keeping your customers informed regularly by email demonstrates your professionalism and commitment to great customer service.

Related Reading

	The Truth About Email Marketing (Truth About) ISBN: 978-0789737946
	Email Marketing for Complex Sales Cycles: Proven Ways to Produce a Continuous Flow of Prospects and Profits with Effective Spam-Free Email System ISBN: 978-1600374210
	Market Segmentation: How to do it, how to profit from it ISBN: 978-0750659819

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