So what is the best day to send email?

I don’t cook much, but every now and then my appetite convinces me that it is worth the time and effort. Recently, I thought that it would be a good idea to do some baking with my daughters. We decided on cookies, unanimously.

My daughters cooking (without a recipe!)

I pulled the tried and tested Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook off the shelf and we rummaged through for something that met the approval of our mutual taste buds. Thirty minutes later, there were crumbs on the floor and a sink-full of dishes. Mission accomplished!

Recipe for Peanut Butter Cookies

1/2 cup margarine or butter
1/2 cup peanut butter
1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar 1/2 cup packed brown sugar or 1/4 cup honey
1 egg 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

* bake at 375 degrees for 7 to 9 minutes or till bottoms are lightly browned. Cool cookies on wire rack. Makes about 36.

Some email marketers use a similar approach when determining the best day to send email. They decide what to send and then look for an available recipe for good send dates. There are some good email marketing metrics available, like eROI’s Quarterly Email Statistics Report.

When betting on horses, a conservative bettor will play the odds. He might not get a huge payoff, but it is the safest way to play the game. Conservative email marketers are no different. They will play the odds and use benchmark data to determine when to send email.

Here’s the rub.

It costs the same whether you send your message out on Tuesday or Saturday. So the horse analogy doesn’t quite fit this scenario. Also, not all recipes are created equal. We enjoyed our cookies this weekend, but I’ve had much better in local bakeries where they created their own custom recipe rather than using the Betty Crocker benchmark. The same it true with email marketing benchmarks. Industry averages can be telling. But they are not necessarily the best fit for your own particular audience.

The only way to really know the best day to send email is to create your own recipe by running tests on your own, unique audience until you find the best response. Track your own email, testing open and click-through rates on different days of the week over a predetermined time period.

…and always keep in mind that an old recipe can get stale after a while. Your audience can change their habits and the best day to send email can too.

How many people clicked on each link in your last message?

What email addresses on your list should you send a follow up email to?

With our GroupMetrics email tracking service, you can answer all of these questions and more. GroupMetrics allows you to track the open and click-through rates of your email campaigns, right down to specific email address activity. You can view reports in real time and export both professional .pdf presentations with graphs to share with your boss as well as raw data in .csv and .xml format so you can organize follow up mailings with those who either opened or clicked.

You can even share reports with clients so they can login and see their reports for themselves as the data comes in. GroupMetrics allows you to view both general reports (i.e. what percentage of recipients opened my email?) and unique data reports (what specific email addresses clicked on my purchase link?)

Are you ready to improve your email campaigns?

Sign up for a free, pay-per-use GroupMetrics account and get 100 free credits to test the service for yourself.

No doubt, this increased volume of email played an important role in the record sales achieved on Cyber Monday in 2010.

Retailers’ email marketing efforts helped propel Cyber Monday online sales to record-breaking levels. According to comScore, online sales reached $1.028 billion on Cyber Monday, up 16% versus a year ago, making it the biggest online shopping day in history and the first to surpass the billion-dollar mark.

On Black Friday, 69% of retailers sent email, on par with last year. However, just as Cyber Monday has been spilling over into the preceding day, more Black Friday messaging landed in subscribers’ inboxes on Thanksgiving Day this year. 60% of retailers sent email on Thanksgiving Day, up from 45% in 2009.

For more details, you can download the full Black Friday & Cyber Monday report from the Responsys download page.

Our GroupMetrics email tracking service makes it easy to know who opens your messages and who clicks on the links in them.

If you want to get started with email tracking, you can sign up for a free pay-per-use GroupMetrics account.

Once you have a GroupMetrics account, you can integrate email tracking into your GroupMail email marketing campaigns.

We have step-by-step instructions that will show you how to insert open rate counters and tracking links in GroupMail for your next email marketing campaign.

1. The embedded image in the email was over 3Mb large
2. Her antivirus software was scanning each outgoing message
3. She was including a .pdf attachment to the email

When using large images in your email or when using multiple images in your campaign, consider using a remote image path to the images rather than locally embedding them. This way, rather than weighing down each message with large, locally embedded images, you can link to the images hosted on the Internet. The effect, as far as the recipient goes, is the same; but the time to send your message will decrease significantly if you use remote images rather than locally embedded ones.

To use a remote image, click Insert/Picture and select the “Remote Image” option. Enter the full http:// path for the image that you want to use and click OK. To modify an existing image, just right-click on the image and select “Image Properties.”

Also, rather than attaching large files to an email, consider linking recipients to the file(s) hosted on your website or file sharing site. This will achieve three things:

1. People are more comfortable clicking on a link to get to information than they are about opening attachments (which are notoriously used to spread viruses.)
2. It will keep your message light so your email marketing campaigns send faster, and
3. It will prevent problems with antispam filters who are cautious about certain attachments in email

Finally, most antivirus software is configured by default to scan both incoming and outgoing email. When sending large email marketing campaigns, consider disabling the outgoing scan. We have instructions for disabling Norton from scanning outgoing email. You can search for instructions for your own antivirus software. This will speed things up substantially.

We have previously posted other tips for increasing the speed of email marketing campaigns that you can consider as well.

GroupMail users can insert their open rate counter and tracking links right from within GroupMail when composing their email (if they have a GroupMetrics account!). We have instructions for adding GroupMetrics email tracking to your GroupMail email marketing campaigns.

Knowing who opens your email and who clicks on your links will put you in a better position to analyze the performance of your email marketing campaigns and make it easy to run follow-up campaigns.

Email Marketing Report Grid

GroupMetrics 2.0 is now alive and kicking, here we take a quick look at some of the new features:

Redesigned User Interface
The GroupMetrics User Interface has been redesigned from scratch. We’ve listened to all you had to say on the old system and tried to come up with a new interface which is both simple and powerful.

Email Marketing Report

Client Access
Your clients can now be granted read-only access to their email marketing reports from the Accounts page.

Flash Reports
We’ve replaced our reports with a new set of flash based reports which can be zoomed, scrolled and interacted with. They allow for far more dynamic reporting than the old GroupMetrics. It also allows us to show some new reports, such as the Map report and interactive campaign timeline.

Email Marketing Report - Map View

Safety/Security
The new system is far more robust…if any gremlins should appear, your links still redirect to your url and your stats will be updated after the system plays catch-up.

Overrages / Credit Protection
We’re introducing an overrage system which will track additional opens, even after your credits have elapsed.

Custom Currencies
Custom currencies can now be set within your account page for the goal and PDF reports.

Group Export
It is now possible to export a list of all the unique email addresses who have clicked on a link or opened an email. This feature allows you to create custom lists of recipients who are more likely to click links or open emails. These lists can be directly imported into groups within GroupMail.

We’re already working on some pretty cool new features, but if there’s anything you hate/love, or would like included, let us know here.

Open and Click-through rates with GroupMail

Here is a sneak preview of the new interface, showing opens over time, overall campaign results and the clicks on individual links.

The numbers are based on an actual campaign sent, so for me it is interesting that a couple of months after the send there are still people opening and clicking on links in the message – at least I’m not the only one behind on my email !

Once the new version of GroupMetrics is completed and put live (in next couple of weeks), we intend to have an update of GroupMail available shortly afterwards that will make it really easy to optionally incorporate open and click-through tracking in your campaigns (up to now this involved having to manually insert the open and click tracking code in your messages which is a PITA).

I guess even if incorporating open, click-through and goal tracking in your email marketing campaigns is not important to you at least it will help you brush up on your world geography !

Email Marketing Reports Click-throughs

So what do you think ?