In the previous posts, we took care of marketing automation and helped you understand why it’s crucial for your online marketing strategy. But, marketing automation is software that works when you input the right information. While you can create the best drip campaigns and nail your content strategy, you will achieve successful results only when you push the emails at the right time. In other words, timing is everything when it comes to executing an email marketing campaign. In this post, we will discuss why you should care about your email marketing frequency and how often you should email an audience. Let’s get started!
Why is the timing of your email important?
Cold email outreach can be successful. But, only when you take figures and cold hard data into consideration. Sending an email doesn’t cut it. You have to send them at the right time to achieve higher open rates. The right ‘email timing’ is a result of various factors and elements working together. You need to take demographic, location, email content, the value offered, and other factors into account when drafting an email marketing campaign.
For example, the frequency of emails shouldn’t be the same for older and younger audiences. This is because time perception differs from one age group to another. Younger audiences perceive that time is going slower, and they have a lot of it on their hands. Older audiences perceive time to go faster than it used to.
Therefore, most older audiences wouldn’t appreciate it if you send them as many emails as you would send a younger audience. While young adults would appreciate more emails in a week, the older audience will find it pestering.
For your B2B audience, marketing managers should aim to send emails mid-week to gain better employee engagement. However, you will have different timings for executives and entrepreneurs since they pay more attention to their email on Saturdays.
Similarly, you would want to send emails to a workaholic audience overnight because they are most likely to check them in the morning over a cup of coffee. Self-employed people, on the other hand, would not get the time to check their emails before Friday night. To put it simply, you will want to consider as many factors as possible to nail your drip campaigns’ timing.
What is the best day to send an email?
B2B emails can be of different types, namely, drip campaigns, newsletters, and follow-up emails. How would you know when to send them to your leads? Let’s discuss them in detail.
Drip campaigns
A standard for email marketing, these email campaigns help marketing managers influence the audience and encourage the recipients to take action. Drip campaigns are helpful in making visitors go back to their carts and complete purchases. These are essentially abandoned cart reminders and retargeting/remarketing campaigns.
Best time: Tuesday or Thursday (8 am, 1 pm, 4 pm, or 6 pm) (Source)
Newsletters
The right scheduling is crucial to making newsletters work for your organisation. Newsletters are typically sent to customers once a month or once a week. Such email campaigns help keep the customers engaged. Newsletters perform the worst when sent on Mondays.
Best time: Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday (10 am, 11 am, or 2 pm) (Source)
Follow-ups
Timing is key for the success of follow-up emails. These are time-sensitive campaigns since they are sent after an in-person meeting or when the recipient fails to open or respond to a proposition. Marketing managers should send follow-up emails after waiting for at least 48 hours.
Best time: between 10 am and 11 am or after lunch
To sum it up, marketing managers should expect high click-to-open rates around 10 am, 1 pm, and 6 pm. Hubspot recommends such timings since most audiences begin or conclude their day during this time, and go through their emails. The B2B campaigns should focus on sending emails to employees mid-week around 10 am while executives and entrepreneurs should receive the emails at 10 am on Saturday. Additionally, B2B mails tend to get more engagement during working hours on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Sunday, however, is the least effective day for sending emails.
How to find the ideal frequency for your emails?
Yes, it is quite possible to nail your email frequency and timing. All you have to do is follow these best practices and analyse the insights produced by the marketing automation tool you use. Let’s discuss the best practices in detail, shall we?
Consider customer life cycle
Base your email marketing frequency on the customer purchase cycle. This is important because not all customers have the same purchase cycle. For a SaaS company, where customers usually purchase business software once, you would want to send out occasional updates, training, or upsell. B2B audiences might not want to receive frequent product-related emails.
Identify email program goals
Spend time identifying the goals of your email marketing program. The ‘why’ behind the campaign is much more important than the ‘how often.’ What is it you want? Are you looking for online purchases, drive traffic, build loyalty, or close deals? Things often get confusing if you have multiple goals within the same audience or email list.
Apply best practices to all campaigns
You could be sending sales, marketing, and automated emails to your audience. Marketing managers might think they are sending 2-3 CRUCIAL emails every week. But, the audience might be receiving 8-10 emails per week! Here’s what you need to understand — it’s counterproductive to send a webinar update, a blog update, and an upsell email the same afternoon.
Let subscribers take control
Why not ask your email list about their preferred email frequency? Give them the option to choose the preferred email frequency when they sign up to your email list. You may also do this during a re-engagement campaign. We suggest you give this option also when people try unsubscribing to your email list.
Analyse email deliverability
Are you even reaching your potential clients’ inboxes? Create a long-term deliverability strategy that you can experiment with, especially if you intend to boost email frequency. Remember, you might lose many subscribers while experimenting with email frequency. And too many spam complaints and low engagement will make Google flag your domain. As a result, all your emails will end up in the spam folder. Therefore, keep a close eye on the performance metrics when playing with email marketing frequency.
Set expectations right off the bat
This is an excellent strategy to make your subscribers stay for long. Let them know from the outset what they can expect if they subscribed. Couple this strategy with subscriber input and you will have enough data to work with for your upcoming email marketing campaigns.
Practice consistency
Stay consistent with your emails. This is important for several reasons. First, sending consistent emails is more practical as you get to create a schedule for your email marketing team. Second, consistent emails are better as it helps clean the list off of disengaged contacts. Third, consistent email communication makes it easier for organisations to stay on top of their potential clients.
Use industry averages
Lastly, keep a close eye on how the industry performs when it comes to sending emails. The industry average is valuable data that helps companies decide how often they should send emails and how many emails to send.
Key takeaways!
Email frequency is a massive factor, which when played with, can generate different results for your email marketing campaign. Therefore, we suggest you continue testing and figure out what works best for your company and industry. The frequency might even be subject to your particular email list. So, the factors email frequency depends on can be endless. This makes it all the more important to keep gathering data and analysing to achieve better engagement and email marketing ROI. Don’t forget to check out other informative posts on the blog!
