Study: 62% of Consumers Have a ‘Magic Hour’ When They Click Through Emails

According to a recent report from SimpleRelevance, consumers open their emails at all hours during the day. However, the majority of them seem to have a “magic hour” when they do all their clicking in emails to get to websites that lie behind those messages.

The ‘Magic Hour’
SimpleRelevance finds that 62 percent of customers had just one hour per day when they preferred to “click through an email message, digest its content and potentially make a purchase.”

To improve the chances that a recipient actually opens and clicks through an email, marketers have to go beyond simple segmentation and use available data to figure out in which hour an individual consumer is most likely to click. In other words, marketers have to go beyond segmentation and use true personalization, according to SimpleRelevance.

Gender
According to the study, men are likely to open an email up to 21 hour-long periods throughout each day; the average male opens emails during an average of eight hour-long time periods a day.

Women open their emails up to 23 hour-long time periods a day; the average female opens emails during an average of seven unique hour-long time periods each day.

SimpleRelevance finds that 57 percent of males and 66 percent of females have one preferred hour when they click through an email to get to marketers’ websites each day.

When it comes to timing, men are more likely to click through emails to get to websites during the morning, while women are more likely to do so in the afternoon into the evening.

“Gender is a basic demographic segmentation tool for marketers,” the report notes. “But as depicted above, if only one email campaign is sent per day, it will miss more than half of their target customers.”

Income
Another factor SimpleRelevance examines is income. The report finds that consumers earning $150,000 or more are likely to click through their emails from 5-8 a.m. Consumers who earn $75,000 or less are more active from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.

“While these segments have vastly different clicking behavior, it is also apparent that people within the same segment have individualized clicking behavior,” according to SimpleRelevance. “If marketers attempt to find a single time of day to send email to all their customers, they will exclude a significant segment of the population that they want to reach.”