Email Mistake No. 12: Getting the Timing Wrong

By Loren McDonald, Vice President of Industry Relations 

Using an urgent call-to-action is one way to get readers to open your emails, but it can backfire if you don't allow enough time for subscribers to see and open your messages.

A "Today Only" or "Sneak Preview" special tied to a specific day or time frame will encourage many recipients to open the message right away instead of passing it over for another one in the inbox. This past holiday season, I noticed a large number of "Today Only" email offers. Unfortunately, I saw many of them too late.

In fact, typically 30 percent to 40 percent of your subscribers will open or read your email 24 hours or more after you send it. Thus, "today" becomes "yesterday," and the offer becomes invalid for a significant percentage of your subscribers.

Why Messages Can Miss the Timing Window

There are many reasons why your offer timing or deadline might not be in synch with that of your recipients:

1. Not every email user goes into his or her inbox every day, especially consumer users.

At busy times of the year, such as holidays and vacations, a day or more might elapse from the time you send the message to when subscribers check their inboxes and see it. Recipients also might not see your emails for hours or days if they wind up in their junk folder. Most people check those less frequently than the inbox.

A new twist: Many people read your emails on multiple devices-laptop, PC, BlackBerry, iTouch/iPhone and other mobile devices. These people might originally see your email on their mobile devices, but then not act until they get in front of their PCs many hours or days later.

2. Deployment and delivery delays can keep messages out of the inbox during the offer period.

If you have a large list, it might take several hours for your email technology to send out all the messages.

ISPs and email providers (e.g., Gmail) might throttle your emails or delay delivery for various reasons, keeping your messages from reaching the inbox for a few hours. Filtering can sidetrack them to the bulk folder as well, if your subscribers haven't white listed your sending address.

3. Time zones vary.

The United States alone (including Alaska and Hawaii) covers six major time zones. When your email alerts subscribers to a midnight sale beginning at 12 a.m. PST, it is 3 a.m. EST, later than even most New Yorkers' bedtimes. Time zones are even more crucial for international marketers, where "Noon Today" in New York City is 4 a.m. tomorrow in Sydney.

Timeanddate.com is a great resource for coordinating time zones.

Key Considerations

Trying to hit a specific time can be tricky because of deployment and delivery delays, as well as subscriber actions. This doesn't mean you should abandon "Today Only" messages, especially if your list is designed to capture "deal of the day" offers. However, you can manage them so that you reduce exposure to bad timing.

Here are a few tips:

1. Provide more advance notice.

Sometimes this is hard to do, especially if you don't want to tip your hand about your news scoop or your great deal to your competition or stall current sales. When it makes business sense, however, consider alerting subscribers in advance of your "Friday Madness Sale."

2. Use the day of the week and actual date.

Consider using "Tuesday Only" rather than "Today Only." Before banking on this approach, test it several times to see what impact it actually has with your specific subscriber base. Although using the day of week might seem less "urgent," it is also clearer to recipients, no matter when they access their emails.

3. Include the time zone for any time-specific event.

If you promote a sale or offer that begins or ends at a specific time, make sure you include the time zone and the date to avoid any confusion.

Last year, I tried to make a major online purchase using a discount with a midnight deadline. I assumed it applied to midnight Pacific time, where I live, but it turned out to be midnight Eastern time. Fortunately, I was able to make the purchase with the discount via the company's call center the next day.

Always state the time according to time zone ("midnight Eastern time"), and do the math for your subscribers by giving local time in your key time zones ("Midnight EST/9 p.m. PST").

4. Consider honoring time-sensitive offers for some appropriate period after the posted expiration time or date to accommodate late users, such as 36 hours or 48 hours for a 24-hour window.

You don't have to follow the example of one major retailer, which honors its coupons no matter what the expiration date says. However, track when people are opening or acting on your offers. That will tell you how long you might want to keep the window open, without making the extension public.

Outside of your time window, consider redirecting email subscribers or modify landing-page copy similar to this: "Unfortunately, the deadline for our Friday Madness Sale is closed. Please stay tuned for future specials."

5. Track the actual time it typically takes your emails to reach the inbox.

Use seed email addresses and determine both your best and worst delivery durations across major ISPs. Then, adjust your scheduled send times so that your emails will reach the majority of your subscribers within your targeted time window.

6. Send trigger-based reminders to those who haven't opened or clicked.

Also, send reminder emails to subscribers who haven't opened or clicked on your email some appropriate time period before the offer expires. Be careful, however. If you send two emails too close together, you will certainly generate more spam complaints and unsubscribes. This approach can be very effective; however, test it on a subset a few times before instituting it.