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 campaign software? Have you ever wondered if your fellow email marketers are all sending at the same time you do? Convinced your open rate is too low?

Some recent stats may help you answer these questions: What Kind of open rates Are email newsletter marketers getting and what kind of email newsletter software are they using. If you are sending emails with HTML, you probably use your open rate to help rank the success of your newsletter campaign. Even though its not a perfect gauge of whether people are opening and reading your emails, its useful as a relative measure. If it goes up over a little time, more people are probably reading it. If it falls over a short period of time, its almost certain fewer people are reading.

Plus, all other things being equal, it can give you some motivation (if your open rates are lower than other senders) or satisfaction (if your rates are higher). So, here goes Average Open Rate Last 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 breakdown of open rates by day of the week: Monday 13.67% Tuesday 13.21% Wednesday 14.07% Thursday 14.52% Friday 13.25% Saturday 12.09% Sunday 13.26%. Last month, Tuesday was actually the second-worst day to send, at least if you are measuring by open rates. I should point out this, too: the hour of the day that got the best open rate was not 8-9AM, or 9-10AM, but in fact 2-3PM Eastern Time ” email newsletters sent during that hour last month enjoyed a 19.1% open rate.) Does This Mean I Should Switch My Campaigns To Thursdays?

Simple answer, no. if you already are sending to a contact list. 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. In both March and February, Thursday newsletters got the 3rd-worst opens vs. the rest of that 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 shifting your sending based on these stats. If everyone switches their sending schedule to send on say, Thursday, then recipients will start getting a ton of email that day, and start paying less attention to each individual email. One possible reason for Thursdays success last month may be that it wasnt as popular as say, Tuesday or Wednesday for sending email: Percentage of Newsletters Sent by Day Monday 16.0% Tuesday 17.7% Wednesday 16.9% Thursday 16.6% Friday 15.2% Saturday 8.8% Sunday 8.8%

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.

My 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 audience. Some Inspiration And Some Help. Are you getting better open rates than this? Give yourself a pat on the back, but dont get complacent. Open rates arent the be all, end all of email metrics and email newsletter software can play a roll in actual conversions. They do not guarantee that people are reading your emails, only that they have images turned on and that they probably saw your email for at least a moment.

Plus, theres always room for improvement, right? Some ideas that can help you raise your open rates: Ask people to add you to their address books. Some email software programs 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, just 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.