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March 21, 2005

Q404 Bucks the Email Marketing Trend.

Q404 Bucks the Email Marketing Trend. Seasonality Affects
Best Days for Email Response Rates

PORTLAND, Ore. (March 21, 2005) Monday still starts the week with a bang. Wednesday inches it over the hump, and Thursday is a day for action. At least that’s what findings on the best days to send email have uncovered for Q404.

eROI’s guidelines for email marketing (“How’s Monday for You?”), originally published on MarketingSherpa on July 22, 2004 have recently shifted with results received for Q404. The original study found that people clicked and read more emails on Monday than other days of the week. There were, or course, variables to the equation, such as target industry and audience. But overall, Monday came in as the email winner.

Data compiled in Q404 (October-December, 2004), with 60 million emails sent from 1,500 clients, found that the best day to send was a moving target.

As in eROI’s previous study, the company debunked the myth that Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were the best days to send email. But this recent study also showed a shift in recipient behavior. Q4 was the highest volume quarter of the year with the holiday push. Marketers were frantic to get their Christmas specials and holiday promotions out the door to close out 2004 on a high note.

For Q4, Thursday was found as the day for action, with nearly 20% of the weekly clicks. Since the holiday season was so business-to-consumer focused, it seemed only natural that later in the week would display better performing characteristics. By sending on a Thursday the belief was that you would get your brand in front of your customer before the weekend, when consumers supposedly do most of their shopping.

Q4 also showed us that email was distributed more evenly over the weekdays compared to the other quarters in 2004 – between a low of 15.4% of total volume on a Friday to a high of 22.4% on Wednesday. From eROI’s findings, there are high amounts of opens on Mondays but only mediocre click rates. Tuesday and Friday do not have any mentionable characteristics. Wednesday takes over as the king of volume posting with 22.4% of the total email sent over the course of the full week.

Monday still had best read rate.

With the week evening out in Q4 compared to previous quarters, eROI believes that the line between personal or "consumer" email and business email is graying. Because employees are spending more time at the office and less time at home, and the ease of online shopping, it seems natural that consumers are doing more shopping during the work week. When consumers look at their own personal behaviors, no doubt many found themselves shopping for friends and family at work more this year than in years past, and the data certainly points to that.

eROI agrees that variables and constant testing are good, but people are looking for guidelines about the overall state of email marketing.

“People have to understand that our original study was a guideline, not a set of steadfast rules. Always testing is good, but we need to get an overview of the industry as a whole,” said Ryan Buchanan, President, eROI.

So what do the results of Q4 mean for the future of email marketing? In reality, not much, but it does mean that the implications of sending on a particular weekday may not be as important as in the past for B2C marketing. As usual, though, test with your customer base to see when they respond best to email marketing and start delivering email consistently on those (or that) day and/or time. And continue to watch for trends at eROI.