Timing Emails for More Opens
Detailed data helps you improve
By Richard Hong
Most of us communicate with our congregations using mass emails. If you are using MailChimp, Constant Contact, or Vertical Response, you can track your “open rate” to see how many people are reading your email. Crafting a gorgeous, information-filled message is useless if no one opens it. You may not realize that your open rate can be significantly affected by the timing of when you send it out.
On our mailing list, we saw that the majority of the email addresses were from Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. This meant that people are giving us their personal email addresses. Some people check their personal email all the time – for those people, it doesn’t matter when you send it. But for others, they might be unable to check personal email at work, or may simply be too busy at work to read personal email. For them, timing matters.
We all have inboxes that fill quickly. People read emails that are near the top. After an email gets “buried”, you forget it even exists. If you send email near the time people are checking, your email will be at the top of the inbox.
Timing is Everything
We use MailChimp. When we looked at the graph of when our emails are being opened, we noticed a “bump” in the early evening. This makes sense: people are coming home from work and checking email. We decided to time our emails for early evening. When we moved from sending emails during the day to sending them at 7 p.m., our open rate went from about 27 percent to about 37 percent. For us, that 10 percent difference means an extra 50 people are reading our messages.
MailChimp recently introduced a new feature: you can resend an email to people who had not opened it the first time. We had noticed a second “bump” when people are reading email. That bump comes around 7 a.m. These are people who check their email first thing in the morning. Therefore, we adopted a new strategy. We started sending our initial email at 7 a.m., and then we resend to non-openers at 7 p.m. the next day (36 hours later). As a result, our total open rate went up again, to about 45 percent. That meant another 40 people are reading our messages.
Be Guided By Data
I hope this is a practical lesson for you to implement. Above all, the larger lesson is that by paying attention to the data, we were able to make what we were doing that much more effective. The point is not that you should precisely replicate our send times – your community may react differently. 7 p.m. may be too late if your congregation is elderly while 7 p.m. may be too early if your congregation has long commutes and people get home from work later. What matters is that you become aware of and analyze the data available to you.
Above all, analyze the data. Certainly experiment. See what works and what doesn’t. This principle applies to everything your church does. The open rate we were originally getting was not bad; according to the Constant Contact web site, the average open rate for religious institutions is 28 percent. We could have decided that the 27 percent we were getting was about what you would expect. It was good enough. Simple data-driven adjustments made a significant difference.
Don’t settle for “good enough.” Analyze the metrics in everything you do, make adjustments, and you can turn “good enough” into “excellent.”
The Rev. Richard Hong is pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Englewood, New Jersey. He is excited to be blogging about his passion for the church for Presbyterians Today. Hong’s areas of interest are church technology, leadership and church growth. If there’s a particular topic you’d like to for him to address, contact him at rich@englewoodpres.org.