Best Time To Send Email

Best Times to Send Email Newsletters

There are so many important factors in whether or not someone will open your email campaigns. Of course, subject lines are one of the most important since that’s how people decide if they are going to open and read your email, but have you ever thought about the best time to send email? The time and day of the week that you schedule your email can have drastic effects on your open rates. There are a lot of studies out there done on the best times and days to send email, but the reality is you have to A/B test your times against your audience. The best time to send email changes drastically by industry and audience, so they only way to really know which times work best for you is to test! However, understanding the average best time and the average best days to send for your industry will give you a great place to start with your testing. Especially if you’ve just started sending emails or have never sent any emails before. Using the average times for your industry will give you the perfect jumping off point to start testing. Take a look at some of the average days and times in our infographic to use as a starting point for testing the best email send times for your audience!

5 Common Mistakes in Email Marketing

Email Marketing

We have been doing regular Facebook Live sessions in our Email Marketing Group answering you questions and common issues we see. This broadcast focused on the top 5 mistakes we see people making in their email marketing far too often. We’ve recapped those 5 mistakes below and you can watch the two-part broadcast with full examples and details on each mistake in the video section of our Email Marketing Group.

5 Common Mistakes in Email Marketing

1. Not Checking Mobile First
Google’s search strategy is mobile first and your email marketing strategy should be too! Most of the traffic on the Internet comes via mobile and tablet, if your subscribers can’t read or click your email on their phones, you are losing a lot of potential customers.

2. Not Testing Before Sending Out To The Entire List
Test, test, test! We all make mistakes and you’ve seen this in your inbox. You get an email and the subject line has spelling errors or links inside the email don’t work and it’s so frustrating! But you don’t usually take the time to find the link and neither are your readers.

3. Only Publishing New Content
Your old stuff is just as good! If you’re a content publisher, make sure you’re pulling in all the content on your week’s newsletter theme. You’re constantly gaining and losing subscribers and your email subscribers are not the same people as your social media followers. You might be sick of your old content, but your new subscribers are excited to see it and it’s new to them!

4. Not Testing Your Sign Up Process at Least Twice a Year
User experience is everything and widgets break on websites all the time. Just because you subscribed to your own list when you set it up two years ago, doesn’t mean that everything is still working the way you want it to. The main thing we see all the time is people telling us to sign up for their list but their submit button doesn’t work. It happens way too often.

5. Not Doing a True A/B Test
Testing does not mean changing your email every week. You aren’t actually testing anything, you’re just making changes that you can’t make decisions on. A true A/B test involves changing 1 thing in your email and sending it to half of your list and sending your same email template you always send, wth no changes, to the other half of your list. This is the only way to get real test results.

They seem so simple, right? Now that you know the mistakes, you’ll easily spot them in other email campaigns too. Remember to sign up to as many email lists as you can to steal great ideas and test them in your own emails.

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11 Tips for Surveying Your Customers for Best Results – Free Printable!

Email Marketing

Running surveys on your customer base can sometimes feel like an uphill battle. You put all the work and energy into crafting questions to help you get deeper insight for your business and receive such a low response rate. We’ve been there too. After years of running regular surveys for publishing brands, we found some tried and true tricks to get your response rate up, clearer answers, and actual usable data. Before setting up your next customer or client survey, take a look at these tips and tricks to set yourself up for success.

Tips for Running a Successful Survey

Best Practice: Tips for Surveying Your Customers

All questions should reflect your end goal.
It can be tempting to cover several topics in one survey. Keep each survey very focused and specific to one topic, since splitting the focus can create confusing questions. This will help get the clearest and best possible results. If you are looking to get insight into two different types of problems, plan for launching two surveys and stagger their timing. Be ruthless in cutting unnecessary questions and you will get better results.

Ask basic demographic data.
This is your chance to learn more about your customer! Since most demographic data provided by analytics sites is estimated, it gives you a good idea but not necessarily the most accurate one. Now is your chance to ask age, income range, location, and anything other general demographic data that is important for your business and segmenting your customer lists. You can later use this data to target your customers by location, age, or whatever is appropriate for your products or services.

Keep it short.
Keep your language clear and concise, focusing on the simplest and shortest way to phrase your question to avoid survey abandonment. A survey should take three minutes or less for someone to complete. Remember, you’re asking for your customers and clients to do your business a favor. Be mindful of their time and you’ll have much better success at getting them to that thank you page.

Avoid leading questions.
If you lead the customer to an answer there’s no point in sending a survey. For example, instead of “We’ve recently put in a lot of time and energy to create a world class website. What do you think of the new website?” ask “What do you think to the recent changes to our site?” Keeping your questions basic without a lead in will give you more honest answers.

Ask one question at a time.
It can be tempting to throw all of your ideas into a long, related series of questions. Though this seems like an effective way to make use of limited questions, it will actually just produce conflicted or confusing answers. It’s better to ask 3 short questions, versus 1 long, complicated one.

Show how long it will take to complete the survey.
Keep your customer top of mind, you’re asking them to take their time and help your business. Include a completion percentage or total number of questions until the end on every page. Understanding how long a customer needs to commit to a survey before starting it will lead to more completions.

Send at the beginning or end of the week.
A SurveyMonkey report showed that people are most responsive on Mondays, Fridays, and Saturdays. For best results, plan to start promoting your surveys on these days.

Allow a month run and promote your survey across all marketing channels.
If you use the Internet to promote pieces of content, you have a content promotion plan across several channels like social media, email, and your website. Make sure you’re utilizing all these same places to promote your survey so that you catch a good sample size.

Offer a prize.
Offering an incentive can be the key to a success survey and a waste of time. Even something simple like a $10 gift card to one random winner will increase your response rate. People are more likely to complete a survey if there is a chance of them getting something out of it, even if that chance is small.

Promote the incentive.
When marketing your survey make sure to call out what survey takers can potentially win and how easy the survey is to fill out. Specifically, call out the time it takes to complete (Take our 2-minute survey!) and what they can win (For a chance to win a $15 Amazon Gift Card!).

Include an end of survey Thank You page.
Make sure to thank your customers for their time and included details on when and how a winner will be chosen if you offered an incentive. You can use the thank you page as an opportunity to link to another survey or additional information about your company.

Want to have our tips handy when building your next survey?

Download our free printable!

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