As a marketing professional, I'm relentlessly curious about the best time to send my email campaigns. With the average business person sending or receiving 112 emails per day, it’s hard to get people’s attention if you don’t time them right. While there have been countless studies on the subject, I’ve never found any conclusive evidence on what time of day or day of week is the best time to send email.
Recently, one of our company founders was talking with Seventh Sense, a new data analytics company that focuses on personal email habits and whose product integrates with our marketing automation system, Hubspot.
We were a bit skeptical at first, but decided to test it out and were surprised and elated with the results. Below are the details of how we tested the platform and what we found.
Testing Parameters
We’re obsessive about A/B testing and Seventh Sense has built some cool tools that ensure the A and B audiences are equal in terms of amount of engagement and most recent time of engagement in marketing emails. We also needed to make sure that the lists we were sending to would have statistical relevance, so decided to test it with a large mailing (>57K contacts).
The charts below provide detail on each test mailing and segmentation of contacts that had previously engaged with a piece of our content.
Once we created two equal audiences (a very simple process), we used two delivery approaches to test whether Seventh Sense’s method of personalizing the delivery time through Hubspot would have an effect. For further clarification, we used our normal way of sending on one specific day/time as our control as this is the way we have always delivered our email campaigns.
How Seventh Sense Works
Seventh Sense uses the Hubspot workflow engine to initiate the delivery of emails, so all of our reporting, email creation and delivery is still handled by Hubspot. Otherwise, this would have been a non-starter for us.
Delivery Method
Mailing Timeline
Results
Our results were dramatic. We saw an open rate increase of 54.08% using Seventh Sense’s method of personalizing the delivery time compared with our normal batch delivery method. We also saw a click rate increase of 36.44% and a click magnification (click per contact) increase of 17.69%.
Below is an annotated screenshot of our Hubspot email dashboard.
These results were astounding to us, especially considering that the only thing required to see these types of increases is to spend an extra couple of minutes each time we send out a campaign. Seventh Sense also continually learns and adapts as new and existing contacts engage. In turn, we’re experiencing more conversions on our landing pages, which is leading to more leads for our salespeople to follow up on. We’re quite thankful that we discovered Seventh Sense.
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