L’instant décisif

At home I have a framed picture of Henri Cartier-Bresson, a famous French photographer. It was published on the first page of a French newspaper printed the day after HCB died at the age of 96. The head line runs “L’instant décisif”, the decisive moment. This expression was coined in the fifties to describe the type of photography that HCB practiced and advocated. It means that photography is about capturing this unique moment, when everything falls into places, composition, characters and light…

How on earth does this relate to online marketing you ask? Well actually looking at this picture yesterday I was thinking that everything in life is about timing, and that online marketing campaigns are no exception.

Forget about postal strikes, there are other things that you can be in control of

A well honed campaign will fall flat if failing to meet its audience. This is a verified truth with regards to content (targeted), but this is also true of timing.  I am right now thinking of users of direct mail who planned a campaign this week..Industrial action from Royal Mail will no doubt have some heavy consequences for them.

Unfortunately not everything is predictable or in our control.  However outside of some exceptional circumstances, there are facts and techniques that you should know about to get it right.

I will be looking at how it is possible to maximise your chances to get your email marketing messages, and your blog posts in front of your audience.

Email marketing: get up to 50% higher open rates

First, here are some facts.
1.    The average open rate is 22.7%.
2.    75% of emails are open within 24 hours of being sent, this then stabilises at 80% (48 hours).
3.    Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays have the highest open rates (37.1%) and click through rates (5.2%).

Taking into account these with your email campaigns, you should:

• Send your emails ensuring that they’ll reach your recipients inbox on Sundays, Mondays or Thursdays, or the day just prior.
• Don’t send on a Friday, it’s the worst day of the week for open and click through rates.
• Arrange for your email campaigns to reach your recipients between 10am and 2pm, mid-day is when you’ll get the highest open rates.

Following these 3 simple rules should help increase your open rates by up to 50%.

Bear in mind though, that the above figures are averages, so they may not apply to specific audiences. If you’re addressing a population who tends to work outside the 9-5 schedule, chances are your recipients won’t read their emails between 10am and 2pm. Also, if you are addressing overseas clients, you will need to adapt these recommendations to take into account their local time.

To move away from just applying recommendations based on averages, as usual the best thing is to understand your audience better.

With opt-in lists it should be straight forward as supposedly, your recipients are likely not to opt-out after the first message received. Hence, overtime you should be able to collect precious behavioural information.

The things you will need to look for are:

• open rates
• time and date of opening (individually and aggregated)

Analysing this data will help you find trends, and segment your list accordingly. This done, carry tests and send your messages at different times to different groups. Also take time to regularly check who is active in a list and who is not, people’s habits may change.

Alternatively, some email marketing solutions retain the opening time information and automatically calculate what is statistically the best time for sending to each individual in your list. It is a solution like this one that we use at White Hat Media.

Blog posts: you want to look for a maximum viral effect

With the social media scene getting busier every day, getting noticed has become an art.

Again, here are some (pretty scary) facts:
1.    It is said that the life span of a tweet is on average 10 minutes.
2.    Facebook receives over 1 Billion monthly visits
3.    In the last 3 years a new blog was created every 2 seconds.

So, when should you post on this blog to make sure you’ll reach this precious audience?

• To maximise viral effect, find out when your readers are most likely to be online. The principles evoked about email marketing apply.
• You can choose to post during low-activity hours, to give your message a better chance to stay in the “new posts” section longer. High-activity hours will per comparison give you more exposure, but probably less engagement because of noise level.
• Try posting at different times of the day and check when on average you get the most comments.
• If you put a link onto your website in the post (which is recommended), use analytics to verify when your post got the strongest impact in terms of visits and learn from it.

Resources

About Henri Cartier-Bresson

Email Marketing Statistics (October 2009) – Econsultancy

Dave Chaffey – Email Marketing Book Blog

Search Engine Land

Posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 12:48 pm in Blogging, Email Marketing, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.