We found new research from Yesmail on email statistics. After analyzing 7 billion, yes billion, emails, Yesmail was able to glean some pretty interesting statistics. The most interesting findings were that 20% of all emails sent in the second quarter of 2016 were on Thursdays, making that day the most popular day for sending, while the weekend was least popular. Overall open rates have remained consistent, but unique click rates fell by 18% from year to year. The proportion of mobile clicks to desktop clicks grew by 15% since 2015.
Emails sent on Thursdays had the lowest conversion rates, whereas emails sent on Saturdays and Sundays resulted in higher conversion rates. This tells me that people see the emails in their inbox on Thursdays and probably hold on to them until they can do something with them on the weekend. If you’re sending a fresh email on the weekend, it might push your email right to the front.
We’ve asked the question Does email marketing still matter? in a recent post. We know that the answer is yes. However, there are always unique situations and industry-by-industry standards that are worth discovering. Find YOUR best days for email. Take this research as a basis, but do your own email statistics tracking to find out if this is true for you, your industry, and your customers. It might not be. For instance, industries that appeal to construction workers, such as paint manufacturers and concrete ready mix suppliers, have two very different work days going on. There’s the office management employees who are sitting in their desks from 9 to 5 and blogging, Facebooking or posting photos that they want the employees who are out in the field to see. Those employees out in the field, however, are most likely pulling out their phones and looking at Facebook or checking their email in the evenings and on weekends.
If you want your posts in front of those eyes, you might consider Saturdays to be your most effective day. Or you might send out an email at 7 in the evening on a Tuesday and see how that works out. Test your strategy by sending out an email on different days of the week and following up with a Facebook post at a different time, and see what kind of response you get. The numbers won’t lie, and it won’t take long before you feel confident that you know when most of your customers are looking.
