We Changed Our Email Send Times, Again – Five Graphs That Tell the Whole Story

Happy 2016 everyone! I hope everyone’s years finished off with a bang and you weren’t stuck in the office late on Christmas Eve / Your Birthday.

For those of you who have followed the lead generation resource center since its inception, you’ll realize that we’re almost 18 months into this awesome experiment. We certainly appreciate your avid readership, as it inspires us to cover all the latest in online franchise lead generation.

One of the things I want to do early this year is revisit some of the most popular topics that we’ve covered. (You can always find our most popular topics in the left rail on the desktop version of the site.) We’re learning something new around here every day, so it’s important for us to make sure we keep y’all up to date on our most current thinking.

Today, I want to update everyone on our post entitled “When Should You Send Email to Potential Franchisees.” (Feel free to check out the original post by clicking here.)

Here is what we concluded:

So what are the highest level conclusions? -- 2AM – 6 AM is almost certainly the wrong time to send email to potential franchisees. -- If impressions are what you’re going for, then the afternoon has the highest open rate. -- Based on click rates and CTRs,the evening seems to be the winner, even if the open rate is lower than the afternoon.

Well, after almost two years of sending the majority of our emails in the evening, we’re changing our tune a bit.

Before I dig into the details of what we’ve changed, I wanted to deliver on my promise to share the five graphs promised in the title.

What you see here are the opens and clicks over time for five recent FranchiseHelp marketing emails over time. The x-axis counts the amount of time since the email was originally sent out.

Notice anything odd? How about that all the emails follow almost exactly the same pattern. It seems that the opens and clicks are completely dominated by the first hour after the send. It’s a fact of life. People are quick responders when it comes to e-mail. They’re going to deal with it almost immediately.

What does this have to do with FranchiseHelp’s new email strategy?

Until recently, our thoughts were dominated by the question of when we could get the highest open and click rates. That’s why the majority of the emails we sent were during the evening. We wanted to maximize engagement.

In re-evaluating our email strategy, we wanted to prioritize when people engaged over how many people engage. So we’ve decided to start sending emails during the day in lieu of the evening.

What does this mean for you?

Ultimately, you’re going to rarely ever hear us recommend a strategy that leads to lower engagement whether it be paid advertising, PR, email, or whatever. However, what we’re recommending is being thoughtful about what the implications of the engagement is. If you’re asking someone to buy something online, it doesn’t matter when they visit your online store. It’s open 24/7 and they can purchase whenever they’d like. But if you’re asking people to call you, then you have to be there to pick up the phone. Better to have one person call at noon than ten people at midnight!

One of your franchise’s 2016 new year’s resolutions should be to re-evaluate when you send your emails. And we’ll keep you posted on when we send ours.

If you’re interested in learning more about FranchiseHelp’s lead generation programs, click here to learn more.