Finally, an answer to the tricky problem of when to send email. A pundit named Daryl Jay states categorically that you can’t beat morning.
“If the campaign is B2B, the morning is an optimal time as most deskbound workers usually start their day by going through their email inboxes,” he says.
That makes sense, with some slight caveats. B2B marketers “tend to avoid Monday mornings when inboxes are crowded and people are busy,” another pundit writes. A third guru adds Saturday morning is the best time, and others argue that Tuesday afternoon produces the best results.
How do you make sense out of this welter of conflicting advice?
We agree that morning’s a good time—we check our emails first thing. But we keep checking them throughout the day. And we look at them late at night, on Sunday afternoon and just about any time it occurs to us.
Relevant offers will get opened regardless of the time.
But let’s agree, for argument’s sake, that timing is a critical factor. Should everyone send their emails at precisely the same hour?
Even when backed by research, that sort of advice may not reflect the behavior of the people on your email marketing list.
The best course is to test different times, or, as a U.K. writer has suggested, do a keyword Twitter search RSS feed to “find out when people are talking about the stuff you’re selling, and adjust send times accordingly.” Above all, be flexible.
Email specialist Michael Brownyard offers these tips:
1. Look at your past results.
2. Exploit benchmark data on open patterns.
3. Segment by time of response.
We agree. Let’s keep the “direct” in direct marketing.
How’s this for a miscalculation? Per Annum, a small firm specializing in corporate gifts, eliminated its annual direct mailing last year, and suffered a 25% drop in orders.
“We realized we had made a huge mistake,” Alicia Settle, president of the New York firm, told the Wall Street Journal. The firm has since restored its hand-signed letters program, and is pleased with the results.
That change of heart was one of several uncovered by the Journal in an article titled, “Firms Hold Fast to Snail Mail Marketing.” As the headline implies, the Journal found that “some entrepreneurs who were quick to write off direct mail as too pricey or passé are finding it’s not so easy to dismiss.”
Another was Peter Taffae, founder of ExecutivePerils, a wholesale insurance broker. Customers missed the firm’s colorful postcards based on satirical movie themes—and they let Taffae know it. He, too, has returned to the mails. Read the rest of this entry »
A B2B marketer asks: How do you prevent factory mail rooms from blocking your mail?
Good question. It still happens despite the decline in paper mail volume. We consulted our mystery guru, and he offered this suggestion: Make sure you have titles on your direct mail list.
“Corporations may have anywhere from 30 to 100 or more separate and distinct departments, each one with a head bearing a title,” he noted. Read the rest of this entry »
Wayne Nagrowski
Wayne Nagrowski thought that he had seen it all. But he learned something new when an email list rental client wanted to Base 64 encode, or personalize, its opt-out links for every recipient.
“It was a hurdle we’d never encountered,” Wayne says. “But our programming staff was able to figure out what was needed within a few hours, do the manual labor on the data and get the campaign out in the same day.”
That’s the kind of service Wayne routinely delivers as a list management account person at ePostDirect. A specialist in the general business market, a field that encompasses sales/marketing, HR, training and corporate owners, he serves two groups of clients—list owners and mailers. Read the rest of this entry »
Shawn Kingston
Shawn, a list management account manager for the Edith Roman-ePostDirect List Management Data Solutions Group, serves clients in the healthcare, construction and industrial fields. And rentals are booming, she says.
Is it the economic upturn we’ve all been waiting for? Read the rest of this entry »
British postal workers have driven one more nail into the direct mail coffin. They voted on Thursday, by a massive margin, to go on strike for the second time in two years.
The strike approved by 76% of the Communication Workers Union membership, is intended to protest pay cuts and work changes at Royal Mail. But critics said the union has a “death wish.”
Sky News released a survey showing that 75% of all British businesses are thinking of dropping Royal Mail. Read the rest of this entry »
It might be hard to find them in the program. But DMA09, the Direct Marketing Association’s fall conference, offers several sessions of interest to B2B marketers.
For starters, there’s “B2B Lead Generation: Reaching the Exec-Level Decision Maker.” (A pertinent topic: Edith Roman Associates developed its BRAD/BEN postal/email database precisely to meet that challenge.) It is scheduled for Tuesday, Oct. 20, at 11:15 a.m. Read the rest of this entry »
Ask the average direct marketer to name the industry’s pioneers, and they will probably say Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. But there’s an important omission in that list: National Cash Register Co., a B2B concern that was sending targeted mail way before the big catalog houses tried it.
The company was founded in 1880 by John H. Patterson, a store owner in Coalton, OH. He had bought one of the new-fangled machines, and was so impressed with it that he purchased the factory that made it. Read the rest of this entry »