Trends Q: What’s the prime time for resorts to send newsletters and one-time emails?

A few weeks ago we covered what time was optimal for sending snow reports, but immediately the question came up of when prime sending time is for newsletters and other one-time messages. So, we ran the numbers again – leaving out snow reports and other recurring, morning messages – and found a couple interesting trends.

The Goods
Emails from over three dozen resorts were analyzed based on the local time that they sent their emails. When the graphs say 7:00am, that covers any email sent during that hour from 7:00am – 7:59am local time. Very few emails were sent before 4am and 8pm so the data wasn’t reliable enough to include. Here’s how it broke down for open rate.

From this sample there seems to be two high points – emails that are sent first thing in the morning before the work day begins and emails that are sent at or soon after the work day ends.

Clicks, on the other hand, tell a much different story.

Click rates start low for email sent before the workday begin and stay high for the entire 9-5 block, jumping slightly at 6pm before dropping again. However, the two highest points, 9am and 6-7pm, do match high points (obviously, 6pm more than 9am) on the open chart suggesting that might be slightly more effective send times.

The What & Why
The theory that would explain these trends could be two fold, both surrounding the classic 9-5 schedule. When an employee first gets to work around 9am, a common thing to do is catch up on emails that came the night before. The sooner your email arrives before they boot up their computer, the higher that email will be in their inbox.

Likewise, someone gets off work at 5 and doesn’t check their email until they get home, grab some dinner, and then grab the tablet, smartphone, or laptop and check their inbox once more. Once again, the email that most recently arrived will be at the top of the list. What about the 4am spike? It’s worth a try. The worry is with so many snow reports going out early in the morning, multiple emails coming in rapid fire from the same resort might be a little too much.

The difference in open rate between 7pm and 11am is almost 4 percentage point which could mean more than 2,000 more opens on a 50,000 recipient campaign. But test it out. Send a few emails at 9am or 6-7pm (or even 4am) and compare them to emails sent during the middle of the day and see what happens.

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