As marketers we strive to deliver the best results for our clients on their campaigns. E-mail marketing in particular has become a tricky business, and the quest to deliver results is increasingly elusive. Response rates, open rates and clickthrough metrics have all dropped recently.
To ensure that you don’t disappoint the client it is easy to fall into the trap of following conventional wisdom to deliver a “well written email with an offer and a landing page blasted on Tuesday morning.” That strategy generally guarantees the coveted 1% to 2% response rate. However, sometimes conventional wisdom needs to be tested. Recently, we developed a quick-turn e-mail for one of our clients. We were scheduled to deploy the e-mail on a Tuesday morning, but decided to test how the e-mail would perform if we blasted it after hours on the previous Friday night. The thinking was that a high percentage of people try to leave early on Friday and diligently check e-mail via their Blackberry, laptop or other PDA on Friday night to make sure they didn’t miss something important. We were willing to roll with the after-hours blast, with an option to re-blast the following Tuesday to non-responders if the results were disappointing. In all honesty, we were expecting to blast again.
The results were very surprising! Response rate, open rate and clickthroughs were all well above average for similar blasts for this client to the same target audience and some of the highest rates of the year.
This doesn’t mean that we recommend sending all emails out after hours, but it does support the need for testing other aspects of an e-mail campaign — not just subject lines.
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