Is it the time of the day? Is it the day of the week?     No it’s the week of the month!*

Of all the things that you can test about your email campaigns it is the Alchemy Worx view that time of day and day of week testing provide the least valuable insights.

A far greater number of people on your list are likely to buy because they have just been paid than the number of people who buy because you sent the email before 10am on a Wednesday.

Several things have brought the old questions – what is the best time of day and/or day of the week to send email campaigns out – back to mind recently. The first was a recent piece of research into consumer behaviour by Forrester. Their “email opens index” reveals that consumers’ personal motivations exert more influence than the time of day a message is sent. When asked “How much did each of the following influence you to open the emails you receive from companies?” Only 9% of consumers sited the time and/or day they received the message as having any influence.

By comparison the top four were:
Your interests – 59%
Your needs at the time – 51%
The sender – 48%
I like the company – 46%

This did not surprise me at all.

Exact Target also released the 2008 Channel preference survey which looked at usage patterns in email by time of day, it identifies an “email prime time” of maximum engagement between 8am and 11am.

One of the most prevalent mantras in email marketing is TEST, TEST, TEST & TEST again; so I can imagine there will be hundreds of marketers out there planning to roll out day of the week and time of day tests at this very moment. WRONG!

Last but not least, Skip Fidura of OgilvyOne in a recent blog points out the inherent flaws in the way most people test for the optimal time of day or day of week to send a campaign. He also said that I have never been a fan of [standard] day of the week testing. That’s putting it mildly! Like him I think finding what day of the week is best for the average customer is meaningless.

In my September post on optimising send frequency I shared the fact that here at Alchemy Worx we have found if you really want to optimise send frequency; it is vital to target all behaviour not just the average, because not everyone on your list wants the same thing. This is also true of send time.  If you conduct a standard day of the week all you will find out is the best day for your list and not what is best for any given individual or groups of individuals. For any given day of the week or time of the day that you could choose to send your campaign out, including 3 am Sunday night, there will be at least one person on your list who thinks that is the perfect time or day and one person who thinks that it is the worst time or day.

I have already stated that we are not fans of day of week testing here at Alchemy Worx unless of course you decide, as Skip suggests, to test and analyse multiple segments over time. Done properly this will require a significant amount of resources dedicated to the test and it will be several weeks or months before you get any meaningful results. To get around this problem we have developed a very effective shortcut; we analyse the effect the time and day of the week a message was received, has on the performance of every message sent over the previous twelve to twenty four months.

Over that time period most companies will have sent messages on every day of the week most times of the day – often without prior intent to test.

This historical data is a goldmine! At the very least you can confidently make your test plan more manageable by focusing on the most likely looking days or days where you do not have any data; best of all you have a benchmark to work from. Our golden rule is this; before you test anything ask yourself if the answer (or part of the answer) is right under your nose in your historical data.

One of the benefits of conducting a forensic audit of your historical data is that it can yield unanticipated and valuable additional benefits. In setting out to discover the best day of the week or time of day for our clients to send their campaigns out, we discovered that which week of the month a message was sent had a far greater impact on revenue than other temporal consideration!

The best week of the calendar month for generating revenue is week 5!

Followed by:
Week 1
Week 4
Week 3
Week 2

Don’t take my word for it, test this for yourselves.

The reason for it is simple, most people feel richest just after payday and in the UK the majority of salaried people get paid between the 25th and 30th of each month (I checked this with the company that handles our payroll).

So if your campaign is monthly aim to get your message out as soon as possible after payday – weeks 5 or 1 depending on the month. If at all possible try to avoid week 2 and to a lesser extent week 3.

If your campaign is weekly you may want to consider lower discounting or adding less value in weeks 5 and 1. Conversely if you need revenue in weeks 2 and 3 you will need a much stronger offer.

So back to my first point; if you also think about send time/day or week in terms of size of segment i.e. how many of the people on your list are likely to feel the same way about something or be in the same situation; a far greater number of people on your list are likely to buy because they have just been paid than the number of people who buy because you sent the email before 10am on a Wednesday.

*In the UK at least

---