Timing Matters in Email Marketing: Report

Thursday is the day to mail if you want the best email open rates, according to a new report from Campaign Monitor.

Looking at over 30 billion emails across 4.2 million campaigns sent last year, the report found that Tuesday was best for clickthrough rates, while campaigns sent on Mondays showed the lowest bounce rates.

The beginning of the week is rough all around for email, according to the report. Sunday was the worst day both for open and clickthrough rates, and Monday showed the worst click-to-open rates. Friday is the day with the highest bounce rates.

Nonprofits showed the highest open rates (20.39 percent); followed by agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting (20.13 percent); government (19.79 percent); and healthcare (19.12 percent).

What industries didn’t fare as well? Consumer packaged goods (14.53 percent), retail (14.98 percent) and food and beverage (15.48) showed the lowest open rates of all verticals surveyed.

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Overall, across all industries the average open rate was 17.92 percent. The average clickthrough rate was 2.69 percent, and the average click-to-open rate was 14.1 percent.

Relevant content is crucial if brands want to optimize their clickthrough and open rates, says Stu Richards, CEO of Bredin.

For example, [if you’re a bank] and a customer already has a business checking account, don’t just send them a random link to an article,” says Richards. “Relevancy is the key to the kingdom in content marketing. If you have a preexisting relationship, personalization should resonate and feel authentic.”

Emails should also have a clear call to action and be easy to read. After all, people may very likely be reading your message in a non-business setting, like while they’re waiting in line at the drug store or watching their kid’s soccer game, says Gordon Brott, founder of Gordon Brott Growth Marketing.  Avoid big blocks of text that make it difficult to read, and keep the focus on the customer, not your product, to keep them engaged.

No one has time to scroll through line after line after line of copy in B2B email, adds marketing writer Mary Hart. Start with a compelling headline, followed by a concise opening that leads into three to four bullet points explaining what your recipient will get if they clickthrough—the more you can convey how your product or service will solve their problem, the better.