Email Marketing Success Depends on More Than Just Time of Day

Email marketers strive to send messages during an optimal time of day for their recipients, but new research indicates that most people check their email frequently at all times of the day and strategies should be influenced by industry vertical.

The “2016 Adestra Consumer Adoption and Usage Study” has found that 84 percent of buyers check their messages at random throughout the day. Additionally, 35 percent stated that they check their personal email between 1 and 3 times during the work day.

“Retail tries to get into the inbox early in the day but that doesn’t mean everybody should,” wrote the authors of the report. “Your industry vertical and type of customer should inform your decisions about the best time to send.”

Statistics showed that there was a difference between baby boomers (ages 56 to 67) and millennials (19 to 34) when it came to flagging emails to be read later in the day. About 71 percent of baby boomers said they do not mark emails in their inbox to go back to later in the day. Just 53 percent of millennials said the same, indicating that many are willing to go through their inbox later to catch up on messages.

The research also shows that email needs to be optimized for mobile. According to the data, more than 50 percent of today’s email messages are read on mobile devices. More than two-thirds of survey respondents will delete emails that don’t look good on their phones and 25 to 29 percent of younger mobile users (14-34) will not hesitate to unsubscribe altogether.

Increasing the Effectiveness of Email Marketing

The “Q4 2015 Email Benchmark Report” from Experian discovered that email transactions according to day of the week are relatively steady. However, the highest percentage of transactions (26.3 percent) tended to be between 8 a.m. and 11:59 a.m. in the fourth quarter of 2015.

“Finding the best time-of-day and day-of-week for a particular brand requires understanding the type of mailing, the offer or message and the selected customer segment,” the researchers concluded. “It also requires systematic testing.”