Email Newsletter Software and Open Rate Tips

Do you know the best day of the week and time to send your email newsletter or use your email newsletter software? Have you ever wondered if your fellow newsletter marketers are all sending at the same time you do? Convinced your open rate is too low or even too high?

Some recent statistics may help you answer these questions: What Kind of Open Rates Are Email Marketers Getting and what kind of email campaign software are they using. If you are sending HTML emails, you probably use your open rate to help gauge your success. Even though its not a perfect measure of whether people are actually opening and reading your emails, its useful as a relative measure: If it goes up over a short period of time, more people are probably reading If it falls over a short period of time, its almost certain fewer people are reading.

Also, all other things being the same, it can give you some motivation or satisfaction. So, here goes Average Open Rate this past Month: 13.6% So when is the best day to send?

You will often hear that Tuesday is the optimal day to send your email campaign, because on Monday people are catching up from the weekend, and that on Tuesday morning you will have their undivided attention before they jump into their work for the upcoming week. Do the numbers back up that theory?

The rate of opens by day of the week: Monday 13.78% Tuesday 13.32% Wednesday 14.18% Thursday 14.61% Friday 13.36% Saturday 12.18% Sunday 13.46%. Just last month, Tuesday was the second worst day to send. I should point out this, too, the hour of the day that got the best open rate was not 9-10AM or during the morning at all, but in fact 2-3PM Eastern Time ” email newsletters sent during that hour last month enjoyed a 19.3% open rate. Does This mean I should switch my campaigns to Thursdays?

In a word: No. Do not break with your readers expectations just to try to follow the latest day of the week stats. You might actually reduce your open rate by doing so. In both March and February, Thursday newsletters got the 3rd-worst opens vs. the rest of the week.

I hesitated a little to release these stats, because I realize that people may start sending their newsletters at the day or time that happened to get the best results lately. Please, do not drastically change your sending schedule because you see that the average last month, happened to be higher on a different day. Yes, you might eventually be able to shift your sending schedule, or split test some campaigns, but if you up and move everything, you may throw off your subscribers who are used to hearing from you at the usual time.

To get at the other reason for not changing sending habits based on these stats. If everyone switches their sending schedule to send on for example, Thursday, then recipients will start getting a ton of email that day, and start paying less attention to each individual email and you still have a lower conversion. One possible reason for Thursdays success last month may be it was not as popular as say, Tuesday or Wednesday for sending email: Percentage of Newsletters Sent by Day Monday 16.1% Tuesday 17.8% Wednesday 16.8% Thursday 16.7% Friday 15.3% Saturday 8.9% Sunday 8.9%

Those higher-volume days mean more emails in readers in boxes, which might contribute to reducing open rates. Following that reasoning, some people may look at the low weekend volume and see an opportunity to get their audiences undivided attention.

The main point in showing these stats is to point out that our assumptions about what works are often quite wrong, and that you ultimately have to test for yourself to see what best suits your recipients. Here is some inspiration and some help. Are you getting better open rates than this? Give yourself a pat on the back my friend, but do not get complacent. Open rates are not the be all, end all of email metrics and business email marketing can play a roll in actual conversions. They do not guarantee that people are reading your business email campaigns, only that they have images turned on and that they probably saw your email for at least a moment.

Some ideas that can help you raise your open rates: Ask people to add you to their address books. Some email newsletter software will display images from senders who are in the recipients contact list. If you are putting pictures in your emails, use the ALT text for those images to pique readers interest in what the picture is, so that they enable images. Or directly ask readers to turn on images! Add a picture of yourself to your emails, near/next to your signature. People like seeing your smiling face, and if they see it in one of your emails, they may be more likely to turn on images to see it again later.

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