The importance of being able to and actually analysing reports on open and clicks rates on the time of day can go a long way to increasing your respective rates. A lot of time and many words have been written about subject lines and email content at improving your open and click rates.
A lot of this is subjective and largely dependent on the product/service you are marketing and your target market. Not a lot has been written about optimising your open and click rates based on the time of day. This is largely because the majority of email marketing systems available do not provide this type of report.
A typical report, as seen below, shows the click/impressions over a 24 hour period.
There are a number of factors to take into account when analysing this data.
- When your email was sent.
- Assuming that you send your email in working hours, the number of emails opened in your first hour or 2 will be highest
- That you understand the correlation between impressions (opens) and clicks. What you want to see is a higher correlation between clicks and impressions and not vice versa. For example:
- If we look at the above graph we will see that the hours 9 - 13 have a greater percentage of clicks when compared to impressions (Good)
- whereas if we look at the hours 14 - 16 you will notice that there is a greater percentage of impressions when compared to clicks (Bad)
- it is only 21 - 22 hours that the trend moves back to a greater percentage of clicks to impressions
On the face of it we can say (based on the report above) that one should be sending out the email at 9am. However, if we know that the email was sent out at 9 am then we are not able to say this with any statistical correctness.
So what do we need to do to be able to draw statistically sound results - TEST. Yes, you will need to time your sends to go off at different hours of the day and then compare your results.
