The cream and butter of digital marketing for B2B.
The quality of an email list determines the success of most business to business company. For most B2C, the issue of email list is not a big deal but for B2B, the ability to generate quality email is one of the most important aspect of their online marketing.
Once you have a quality email list, then you can build, bond and sell to your prospects and current customers.
While building an email list from scratch can be a huge headache for most businesses with a lot of them resorting to purchasing emails, getting your subscribers to even open and read your email messages is another ordeal entirely.
How do you get them to open your email? Does it have to do with title of your emails? Is it your sending time? Is there a perfect time to send any newsletter?
Should I send my newsletter on a weekend, weekdays?
Is morning time preferable or evening?
Recently I had a discussion with someone who said since it is recommended that people send emails on Mondays; they have been sending their newsletter on Mondays.
My next question was obvious. “Have you ever tried sending it at another time”.
After sending lots of email campaigns, I would send there is no perfect send time. Your perfect sending time will depend on a whole lot. It will depend on the timeliness of your message, it would depend on titles and most importantly, it could depend on the composition of your list.
Case Study 1:
An email list which was sent on a weekend had a much more open rate than one which was sent on various times of the day.
Case Study 2:
An email list which was sent at precisely 10 am during the work-hour had a greater open rate than the same email when it was sent on a weekend.
Going from the analytics of these two case studies, you can see that there is no perfect send time for any email.
The two lists were made up of entirely different composition of list. While the first case study had lot of busy people making up the list, the second list is made up of working professionals and had a great composition of work-emails.
To know the perfect sending time for your email, you need to not only understand your audience but you also need to do lots of testing. The greater number of testing you run, the richer the data you get.
Most email service providers like Mailchimp or Aweber has already in-built analytics that you can use to determine the best time to send your email newsletter. All you have to do is send this newsletter at different times.
While this might seems like a great way to approach this, you have to avoid making one crucial mistake.
How to determine the perfect time to send your email newsletter:
Step 1:
Draw up your campaign. Your campaign is the message you want to send to a particular list.
Step 2:
Split your list: Here is where most people will get it wrong. In testing a variable, you have to keep some other constant.
Therefore to ensure the integrity of your test, you have to divide your list into equal parts. Depending on the size of your list, you can decide to run a two or four-way split.
For people with a larger list, this is easier. But even if you do not have a large list, you can still split test your email. Just divide them into segments of two equal part.
Once you have your segments, now send the same campaign out making sure that all other constants remain.
Step 3:
Once your campaign has been sent, check out your analytics. You may want to repeat this test to validate your data.
Optimizing your email is a great way to make sure that you get the most buck out of your marketing campaign. There is no limit to the amount of testing you can carried out but one of the most important thing that will make a huge difference in your marketing campaign is your headlines.
The title of your email is the first thing your list will come into contact with. Even if you send your newsletter at the optimal time to your list, if you have a boring title for your newsletter, nobody is going to care to open it.
There are lot of ways you can improve your headlines but never ever stick to the first headline you come up. It is usually the most boring of all the headlines you will ever write.
