How long does it take for an e-newsletter to have full impact?
Does it take a day, two or more for an enewsletter to achieve its full impact, meaning the maximum number of people See it, Open it and Click on links? It may take longer than you think, which could be important for promoting an event, for example.
Here we offer a case study about a recent email campaign for a client. In this simple market research, Randy captured data from Mailchimp’s newsletter tracking service over a period of two weeks to see when resulting activity stopped. The time study data is insightful. Plus, check out links to other insights from MarketingProfs.com about digital marketing for 2015 and best days and times to send out your email newsletter.
SIDEBAR: Part of Randy is a data geek, with good reason. He wants evidence that a marketing tactic works or doesn’t; clients do too! That includes email and other digital marketing. Yes, creativity is critical and “content is King,” but data greatly helps you make the critical decisions about marketing strategies.
First, take a look at the actual Mailchimp email sent out on January 29th for client Master Remodelers. (BTW, if you clicked on the second link, you’ve seen the new website we helped to build at the end of 2014.)
The e-newsletter Open and Click rates over time
DEFINITIONS: An Open is when somebody views the entire content of the email, not just a short introduction in a list of emails. A Click is when someone clicks on a link within the email, indicating interest in that subject.
Here’s the time study data from the newsletter: (NOTE: sent to 695 highly targeted individuals)
You can see the greatest impact was in 2-4 days, but it took up to 11 days to achieve full Open and Click rates before activity stopped. Kind of surprising isn’t it?
We’ve also got here some Infographic data gathered by MarketingProfs.com.
It confirms our data, but looks at it in a slightly different way: 76% of emails are opened within 2 days.
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Opens & Clicks 3x to 5x higher than the “industry average”
We were particularly happy with these Open and Click rates being this high.
In the case of Opens, it was almost 3 times higher than the average. For Clicks it was more than 5 times the average. That’s probably for four reasons:
1) the email address list is very ‘warm,’ in terms of people who know and like the company,
2) it goes out under the name Regis McQuaide, who everybody on the list knows,
3) we send out very few newsletters a year to keep from being ‘spamy,’ and
4) we carefully plan the content of each newsletter for this warm, targeted market.
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More digital marketing research to hone your strategy
Here are some articles you may want to check out related to email & social marketing:
What is the best time to send your e-newsletter campaign?
Three digital marketing tactics you should adopt in 2015
The best days and times to post social content