The Art of Customer Happiness: How to Send the Right Email at the Right Time

Getting the message right and delivering it at the right time can dramatically improve your marketing results.

Right time, right message, right person, right place has been the mantra that marketers have been chanting this year as everyone tries to overcome the abysmal open and click-through rates (CTR) that email marketing has been experiencing. 2013 figures show that open rates have fallen to 21% and CTR to just 3%.

So now that marketing automation has removed the need for marketers to do the same repetitive email-sending tasks over and over again you’ll want to make the most of the triggered email functionality to send the right ones, with the right messages, at the right time. Especially as a Gartner report revealed that event-triggered marketing will enable businesses to generate response rates that are 600% higher than traditional outbound campaigns.

Email types and when to send them

• Welcome – as the name says on the tin, this is when a customer first interacts with your company. When they first sign up to a mailing list make sure that you have a friendly and engaging welcome email set to respond, highlighting other ways they can engage with you.

• Nurturing – these are the lifeblood of your marketing automation system. Lead nurturing emails are the triggered emails sent in response to actions customers take on your website and when engaging with other emails. You’ll have content pathways already in place so that when they show interest in once piece of content they’ll automatically get sent another. There are great examples of nurturing emails in this blog.

• Reminder – if a customer has registered for a webinar or other events, then triggered emails can send reminders to attend at pre-decided times to increase the chances of them actually showing up. It’s especially helpful if the event is free too! Get more advice on upping webinar attendance here.

• Thank You – everybody loves good manners. So make sure you have a triggered thank you email set to go, so that every time someone downloads something, signs up for something, attends something, you send an email thanking them and highlighting the other great content and events that will likely be of interest to them.

What time of day to send email campaigns?

This is the question that everyone wants to know the answer to but unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a definitive one to satisfy them with.

This recent study from MailChimp analysed more than a billion emails to identify trends in the optimal time to send marketing messages. Findings showed that opens increased after 12pm, and the most active period was between 2pm and 5pm. Thursday’s are the best day according to these results.

You might want to take a leaf out of Online retailer eBags’ book though. By individually calculating the best time to send emails based on what analytics revealed about past behaviour, they increased their CTR by 20% and conversion rate by 65%.

Check out this infographic too, which has lots of stats about the best and worst times to send emails.

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The Author
	Alistair Norman | Marketing Director Alistair is responsible for the strategy, design and implementation of our Inbound and Content Marketing, with a focus on developing B2B and B2C markets.