One Small Change In Time,
One Big Leap In Results
I was once hired by a client to consult on their email marketing initiatives. They were sending out campaigns early Monday morning to a business-type audience. There response was good, but we knew it could be better. They had changed their subject, the content of their message and their link text. They saw some success, but nothing huge. There was, however, one thing they never changed: they always sent their message at the same date and time.

In order to earn my big hourly rate I had to come up with something that would spike results. The pressure was on, and my solution was simple. I told them to send the message out Tuesday at 1:00pm EST. I suspected that many of their subscribers were receiving a lot of messages over the weekend that flooded into their inbox Monday morning. In that flood was my client's message. By moving it to Tuesday, we were able to fight our way out of the weekend clutter right away.

The 1:00pm EST delivery time was also strategic. My theory was that when these business people checked their email first thing in the morning, they had a lot of new messages to respond to. As such, I wanted my client's campaign to get there away from the morning rush. The 1:00pm EST time was perfect for those in the Eastern time zone because they would pick it up after lunch, and to those on the west coast in Pacific time they would receive the email at 10:00am, a time by which they had hopefully processed the overnight emails.

This small change increased the client's opens by 23%, and that led to a huge spike in clicks and conversions. So the lesson to be learned here is to play around with your sending date and time and see what works best for you.