Dan Zarrella, a social media researcher and author, recently revealed in a Hubspot webinar a trove of statistical analysis on email marketing. Zarrella parsed 9.5 billion email sets from MailChimp, ran three focus groups, and did a survey to come to his conclusions about the best email marketing practices. Although Zarrella's insights were directed at "commercial" email, nonprofits can benefit just as well.
Here are some of Zarrella's tips about email marketing.
Personal vs Business and Timing
- If you're worried about whether you should do something different depending on whether you are sending to a recipient's personal email inbox or their business inbox, put that worry on the shelf. Zarrella found that most people (88%) do not use separate email accounts for business and personal. In other words, there is almost no difference between "consumers" and "business people." People simply no longer segment their lives in that way.
- We all worry about timing our emails just right. If asked what day would be best for marketing email, most of us would pick a weekday. Surprise! Turns out that the highest clickthrough rates are on the weekend...Saturday and Sunday. Who knew? Most unsubs (people unsubscrbing from your emails) happen on Monday and Tues.
- Zarrella also cleared up the confusion about what time of day to send your emails. It turns out that emails sent between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. garner the highest click throughs. That is true no matter what day of the week it is.
