In contrast to it’s deserved place as winner of marketing channels all time great cash cows, there has always been a challenge to get email the resourcing it deserves.

Don’t they love to talk about the demise of email.   Yes, everyone is talking on social media and instant messaging each other.  Yes, inboxes are crowded, and people are filtering more.

However despite all the rumours, email remains one of the most profitable and favoured marketing channels today and will remain so for the future.

Remember anyone who wants to buy anything online, connect with any social networks, use apps, message, needs the magic key – an email address!   If you need some ammunition to justify email marketing in your company, here are the facts.

• An impressive 77% of online consumers prefer to get permission-based marketing messages via email versus any other marketing channel, according to a recent study by ExactTarget — The 2012 Channel Preference Survey.
• This same ExactTarget study also showed that email drives consumer purchases more than any other marketing channel.
• The Direct Marketing Association’s Response Rate 2012 Report showed that email has the highest return on investment (ROI) compared to other marketing channels.
• The technology marketing research firm The Radicati Group, Inc., predicts the number of email accounts will increase from about 2.9 billion in 2010 to over 3.8 billion in 2014. This compares to a current 1.1 billion Facebook users, 1.5 billion Twitter users, 175 million LinkedIn users, and more than 10 million Pinterest users.
• Email is the top activity on smartphones and tablets, accounting for 41.6% of U.S. mobile Internet time, according to a recent Nielson survey.
• According to the Forrester Research Email Marketing Forecast, 2011 to 2016, the amount spent on email marketing in the United States is predicted to increase from about $1.7 million to nearly $2.5 million in 2016. The use of email marketing is growing because it works.

So, email remains the most effective way to deliver your message, it’s the #1 actvity on all smartphones and tablets, it drives the most conversions and consumer purchases more than any other marketing channel, and it’s the preferred communication stream for consumers.

Here at Jericho we really can’t stress enough how beneficial an effective email marketing program is to your business.

We also know you should be enhancing your email strategies by coordinating campaigns with other channels, such as social media, mobile, advertising, direct mail, (DM) and search engine optimization (SEO) and consistently testing everything so you know that your emails are hitting the mark.

First up – a definition.  In this post, as with the report suites on our SmartMail Pro platform, and our Metrics Report, we’ve adopted the name approved by The Email Measurement Accuracy Roundtable of the US DMA/Email Experience Council –that is, ‘render rate’.  It’s the same statistic as Open Rate but more accurately describes what happens when the email is ‘counted’*. (More on this below).

Open, or Render rates, have come under scrutiny over the past few years.  Just how useful are they?

We think they are pretty handy – as a measure of brand recognition, subject line relevance and delivery, and as a way of benchmarking a series of emails for improvement or otherwise.  For example: If your ‘From’ name is recognised as a brand that your recipient has a relationship with, your email is more likely to be opened.  If the subject line speaks to their day and their daily needs, sparks their curiosity, or sounds like fun, bingo!  If the email didn’t arrive, it’s not going to be opened.   So if you see rates going up or down, you’ll know something is changing.

The old sales adage is that it’s ‘a numbers game’.  In terms of sheer numbers, clearly if you send your email to a large database, you’d expect to get more response.   However, we don’t all have huge databases, and a small list can be just as informative and powerful.

*How are they measured? Render rates are tracked by the sending servers when an invisible 1×1 pixel image is displayed.  This relies on images being displayed in the recipient’s email program. Many email programs block images by default, and many recipients read their emails without downloading images, or they read them on mobile devices – all of which means that the email will not be recorded as opened or ‘Rendered’.  Combining render rates with click through rates gives a fuller picture.  Often called ‘Opens’  the render rate shows renders from unique subscribers, with the measure taken when an email is displayed (whether fully opened or within the preview pane) by any user. If a user opens the email multiple times, or multiple tracking pixel requests are recorded due to forwarding, only one ‘Open’ is counted per unique email address.

N.B:

I know we’ve talked about this before  (along with every blogger and ESP in existence!) but clients keep calling me and asking me.  Yes it’s true.  Sending your email on the right day, at the right time, can have a HUGE impact on the success of your campaign.

Unfortunately!

I mean that ‘unfortunately’.  It’s really annoying that you can’t just build your brand, get the copy right, and the offer right, and get your call centre staff all chirpy on the phone, and your bricks’n'mortar’ all looking beautiful… why can’t it be enough to just get all of the elements all perfect and then send it any old time?

There are many factors involved in a successful campaign.  None of them (or very few) are black or white.  Most involve a good part of all of science, maths, technology, intuition, experience and art!  And add anthropology too.

Results for Email by Day of the Week

So, sticking to just one question – which day is the best day to send email? Our Jericho Email Marketing Report this year (download it free here) showed some interesting results.  We looked at the volume of email sent on each day of the week, and which days performed best for opens, and click throughs recorded and… drum roll please…

Top Open Rate Days of the Week:  Monday & Friday
Top Click Through Days of the Week: Saturday & Monday
Worst day for Open Rate and Click Through Rates: Sunday

Perhaps all those years of us recommending Tuesday and Thursday meant that they and Wednesday ended with more volume, and therefore less response.  Monday and Friday have been abandoned to an extent by marketers, so there’s opportunity to get organised and snatch those opens and clicks…   and then there’s Saturday – that dark horse that gets more than it’s fair share of clicks.  So, what’s the best day to send my email campaign?  The long answer is that there are more questions! Are you talking to consumers or other businesses? Are you providing information or asking for a sale? Is it time critical or general update?  Is it a one off, or a regular campaign?  There is no doubt that Mum and Dad at home (B2C) are more likely to read their email during the weekend than an office worker (B2B).

TIP
Put yourself in your recipient’s shoes. When would you be most open to receiving, opening, and responding to the email?  One of the simplest ways to decide is to test it! Split your database in two, then send the same campaign to each half at each of your selected times.  Compare the response metrics.

Remember that a good platform like ours at www.smartmailpro.com will let you set up A/B testing yourself, as well as schedule sends so that even if you are not there on Monday (or Friday) your email marketing can get the best results possible.  Good luck – and let me know how it goes )