Email Marketing Newsletters: Your Timing Checklist

When are YOU planning on sending out that newsletter you worked so hard to design?

Monday at 7:30am?

Wednesday at 5pm?

On a weekend?

Your newsletter timing is a huge part of your overall email marketing process. It takes strategic thinking and thorough analysis to get it right.

Most importantly, you need to know your recipients and their preferences.

When would they be more willing to open your email? When are they most likely to check their email?

Have you considered the different time zones in the U.S.? Around the world?

When you’re ready to send out an email newsletter, you need to know when it works best.

Here is a checklist to help you along the way to better email marketing…

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Know your audience

I’ve said before that you need to know what your audience prefers and when they’re most likely to be checking their email. This can all be part of the buyer persona development process you should be building upon regularly, even beyond email marketing.

When you know what your recipients want, you’re more likely to reach them at the best time. It’ll improve your open rate, click-through rate, and beyond. You just might see an increase in follow-through on your call-to-action and with other activity.

Real-Life Scenario:

I subscribe to several email newsletters, and they arrive in my inbox at all sorts of times. I’ve noticed that Monday mornings are the most overwhelming for me as a recipient because I receive so many emails in such a short amount of time.

I almost always postpone opening those emails until later in the week when things start to slow down.

In your case as the sender, you want to stand out from the crowd of emails being sent, so find that optimal day/time that doesn’t overwhelm and lets you be more visible to the recipient.

Resources:

New to buyer personas? Buffer has the Complete Beginner’s Guide to creating them. In this guide, Buffer gives you an in-depth template to follow, which will definitely make the process easier for you.

Impact Branding & Design published an article titled: 3 Buyer Persona Tools That Will Make Your Life Easier. In it, they list tools that help you simplify the persona creation and management process so that you can spend more time on the more important tasks on your list.

Use a tool to analyze optimal send times

I tricked you here. I even tricked myself. The truth is: there are no tools out there that can tell you what you need to know. It’s up to you to know your audience and decide on timing accordingly.

There are plenty of email marketing services to assist you with this process, but the most successful approach for you is to do your own internal analysis.

Real-Life Scenario:

I did a ton of research on optimal send times while I worked with a local nonprofit. We all were very new to this whole email marketing process.

What I quickly realized in all the articles I read was this simple theme:

You need to know your audience

You can invest in different tools and services to get you going, but ultimately: it’s you that needs to do the work.

After I concluded my research, I worked with my coworkers to discover what our audience would prefer the most. We did a survey to get our recipients’ input via social media, which greatly assisted with our final timing decision.

Resources:

Although there are dozens of great articles out there to help you determine the best email marketing timing, I have narrowed it down to my two favorites…

The first: GetResponse’s article – What’s the Best Time and Day to Send an Email? I found this article extremely helpful because it was not only easy to read. It also gave data to back-up the advice being shared.

Although I disagree with their tip about Monday mornings, Constant Contact makes several great points in their article titled: When is the Best Time to Send Your Email Marketing Campaign? I found their input about trends to be right on point. It’s definitely a great idea to look at trends for timing ideas.

Email Marketing Newsletters: Your Timing Checklist