Hello, On my last mail out, i decided to run a test on two different times of marketing to my list. This list was generally a business opportunitty market, and I wanted them to fill out a survey to find the response time, and in return they will get a short audio of my seminar. The two times were one during 1:00pm right after lunch. The second one was 7:00pm right after dinner. In the survey I placed a few questions to get a better idea of what my prospective customer was doing at the time. ex) What are you doing right now? a) Relaxing at home b) At work c) Other In any case, I sent one email at the first time to 1,000 people, and the other to another 1,000. The results were as followed: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The ones sent at 1:00pm were opened at a 68% rate, and out of the 1,000 people, 300 of them went to the survey, and only 200 of them actually completed the survey. From that 200, I read all the responses to my hidden questions, they were all at work, bored, looking for something to waste time. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The other set of 1,000 people opened at a 40% rate, and out of the 1,000 people 300 of them went to the survey, and 170 of them filled it out. From the 260 that filled it out, I found out most of them were tired of work, and wanted to do something else +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ So how to conclude on these results... Possibly if you are sending out a free offer and want a lot of people to read it, send it during work time, because most people will open the email during work. However, if you want to gain sales send it after work, most are tired of work, and want to do something better, so if you got one of those products that promise alot, I would say this is a better time for you.
I see alot of sales during work day. Weekends slow down and holidays are dead. More people are surfing the web at work than at home.
Your results are a bit misleading in a few important ways: 1. You completely neglected the morning hours when many people check their email, especially regarding anything business-wise. With me personally, there's a much better chance I'll respond first thing in the morning when I'm doing a mail check, and if you bothered me with something like that in the middle of my work day, I'd almost definitely hit delete. While that's just me, w/o testing that time frame, you can't really vouch for the results. 2. Your mailing involved multimedia as a bonus. Most people either won't or can't view videos or listen to audio files during work. So if they're checking their email at work, of course they're less likely to respond to something like that, as opposed to the people who are at home. If you didn't include that as a bonus, you may have seen increased participation during the earlier time frame. You need to carefully evaluate your market, the response you're after, the influencing factors in their decision-making process, etc. on a case-by-case basis. There no one right time frame for email marketing. Jenn