A post on The Messaging Times blog makes a case for at least testing whether sending emails at the weekend is more effective than mailing during the week.
The success of weekend mailings is obviously going to differ between organisations and their audiences, and before sending an email about a customer satisfaction survey on a Saturday my first thought is “does the organisation offer support or provide customer contact at the weekend?”, but there are some compelling arguments to trial it.
Looking at just one customer satisfaction survey that we mailed in September – with the initial mailing being sent on a Tuesday and a reminder being sent the following Monday, the number of click-thru’s follows a very typical pattern:
| Day | No. of click-thru’s |
|---|---|
| Tue 8 (email invitations sent) |
517 |
| Wed 9 | 258 |
| Thu 10 | 70 |
| Fri 11 | 38 |
| Sat 12 | 20 |
| Sun 13 | 15 |
| Mon 14 (follow up emails to non-respondents) |
204 |
| Tue 15 | 83 |
| Wed 16 | 25 |
| Thu 17 | 25 |
| Fri 18 | 8 |
| Sat 19 | 9 |
| Sun 20 | 5 |
| Mon 21 | 9 |
| Tue 22 | 7 |
| Wed 23 | 3 |
| Thu 24 | 5 |
| Fri 25 | 3 |
| Sat 26 | 6 |
| Sun 27 | 1 |
For consumer customer satisfaction surveys we find that it generally doesn’t make a lot of difference when we mail Monday to Friday – after two-three weeks we typically collect the same number of responses overall. In the results above, the first weekend’s results don’t indicate a massive drop just because it’s a Saturday, and later weekends look like mini-spikes.
Mailing on a Saturday could just delay the first day’s big click-thru rate until the Monday. Or, perhaps mailing on a Saturday generates a significant response rate boost because many more people actually see the email and feel they have more time to respond..?
If we can test this out we’ll post our findings here. And if you have any experience we’d love to hear.
Dan Wardle
The Messaging Times post that inspired this one: Weekend Email Campaigns
[...] 30, November 2009 · Leave a Comment One Saturday lunchtime two weeks ago I logged onto one of our servers to send the email invites for two customer surveys that we field regularly. Some time ago the Messaging Times posed the question whether sending emails at the weekend is more effective than during the week – which got us thinking. [...]