Waiting for rain

Is there an optimal delivery time?

When analyzing the time of sending, you can consider countless factors — whether an individual contact opens their email depends not only on the weather or the day of the week, but also on personal events such as birthdays, illness or vacation. Since analysis with such a large number of factors is virtually impossible, it is necessary to confine oneself to the most important and general points.

Is there an optimal shipping day?

To get started, we asked ourselves the question: Is there — if not the optimal shipping time — the optimal shipping day?

To this end, we have analyzed the open rates of email campaigns from 30 different B2C companies over the last ten months. These are companies that mostly send out daily offers, so that the values are easily comparable on the different days of the week.

It can be seen that the daily mean values of the open rate certainly differ on the individual days of the week. However, there is no day of the week that could be identified as an absolute favorite. Especially in the B2C sector, you could expect that shipping at the weekend would result in increased opening values. Our analysis was also unable to confirm this in general. However, if you look at the individual companies, the figures are above average on certain days. So you can't make a general statement as to whether a day is suitable as a shipping day or not, but you can make a company-specific one.

Shoes or chocolate? Students or pregnant women?

Each company must be analysed separately based on its product identity. Which product is being advertised? Which target group is it sent to? Are there any special limited-time promotions? A weekday that proves to be a bad shipping day for 90% of all companies can prove to be a goldmine for another company with sparkling opening values.

Now let's say we've spent weeks researching, collecting terabytes of data and analyzing what heads and computers yield, and have found our optimal shipping day. It's supposed to be Saturday! We can finally sit back and admire our beautiful opening figures for all eternity. Or is there anything else to consider?

Is soccer to blame now?

Let's take a look at a report from one of our customers. These are the opening and click values of a B2C newsletter, which has been sent almost exclusively on Saturdays for months. The target group and the product — a movie portal with current blockbusters — are always the same.

Despite the same sending day, the opening value of the newsletter fluctuates between 39.8% and 54.2% and the click values between 3.0% and 5.4%, which means that the click values differ by up to 32.3% from the average value.

At first glance, the diverging values appear unfounded. However, when you know that August 12, 2012 was the farewell party for the 2012 Summer Olympics and that the weekend was therefore in the hot phase, it makes perfect sense that newsletter openings drop to just 39.8%. The minimum click-through rate was achieved during the 2012 European Football Championship.

Sisyphus sends his regards

Considerations about the optimal shipping time therefore never stop. Data must be evaluated again and again — the behavior of recipients can change, severe weather and major sporting events influence response behavior.

As an email marketeer, you have to know your customers and the advertised products well in all their dependencies on seasonal or individual events. Many years of experience in email marketing help to decide which tests and analyses make sense and lead to useful results and which factors can be ignored.