This article has been provided by Force24.
There’s no denying that content curation is one of the biggest building blocks of your digital marketing campaign.
By tapping into behind-the-scenes insight to perfect personalisation techniques, and deliver content that truly satisfies the of-the-moment needs and interests of your email list, you can ensure a level of confidence unlike any other.
But picture a scenario in which your marketing team spends countless hours drafting, building, and optimising a winning piece of comms, only for you to hit the send button and it land in the inbox at the same time as thousands of other emails.
It’s a nightmare scenario for every marketer, but with so much competing advice on the best and worst times to distribute your digital content, it’s a constantly occurring challenge.
And with the cost of living crisis placing budgets under tighter constraints, there’s never been a more critical time to ensure marketing efforts don’t go to waste.
So, When Should Marketers Actually Send Emails?
Here’s the controversial bit, and it’s certainly not what everyone wants to hear, but there’s no universally optimum time to hit ‘send’.
And by leaning on data from the likes of MailChimp to strengthen email performance, marketers risk seriously diluting their messaging and having it fall into the abyss.
Consider this: you’re reading this, right now, with the intention of gleaning some unique, winning formula – but if every comms professional took the same time-stamped specifics into consideration, every single email would land at the same time. And if this was the case, how could any brand’s message ever stand out?
The trick is to see how your own contact list behaves. By conducting research amongst your own customers, you can determine when the highest level of open rate occurs, when engagement is at its highest, and so on.
And with these tiny clues, you can shape specific times for individual segments, as well as wider campaign strategies moving forward.
Just remember to monitor these insights on an ongoing basis, to meet the constantly-evolving demands and habits of modern consumers. Just because an email segment loves receiving emails twice a week, on a Tuesday and Friday morning between 11am and 1pm, doesn’t mean that will always be the case!
Delving Deeper Into Sending Patterns
Equally as crucial in maximising your email deliverability, is reducing the risk of being treated as a spammer. If the plan is for an IP to become a dedicated IP, consider warming it up with email throttling.
Some organisations conduct a week or two of warming up, before sharply increasing the send volumes. But this is risky, because spam filters may suspect that sudden spikes are a result of email servers being compromised. As a result, incoming emails will be blocked as a precaution – and the digital campaign will fall flat.
Any uplift should be gradual, even with a warmed up IP!
