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Ask The Marketing Guy

I understand that we all hit some speed bumps while marketing on the information superhighway. I’m here to help. I’ll answer questions for you, whether they are general or specific. Need some help brainstorming blog content ideas? Want to write better content? How many times should you send emails a month?

I’m here to answer any marketing questions related to online and multi-channel communications. Need advice or insights to some problems you’re finding? Go ahead, ask me anything marketing related. ANY Question you have, I may answer in a future issue of iContact Marketing Monthly and in our iContact Blog. Send me an email and ask me your toughest questions. Include your first name, company name, and your detailed question, with the subject, “Ask the Marketing Guy.”

QUESTION:
I send a newsletter to financial advisors. What is the best time of day and the best day of the week to send a newsletter?

ANSWER:
A lot of people will benefit from this question, whether you send to financial advisors or tea koozie collectors.

I’ll never say you’ve wasted an email marketing campaign effort because you didn’t send during the “best times” because as long as you’re producing your content and getting it out there the best you can, you’re doing a whole lot more than a lot of other businesses out there.

Are you BtoB emailing?
You’re going to be better of to sent email Tuesday thru Thursday, between 9:30 am and 3:00 pm. “Studies found that Monday’s are generally reserved for meetings, organizing, catching up on all the tasks left over from the week prior, and messages sent Friday afternoons are often ignored or show up at the bottom of the list when downloaded on Monday morning.”

Are you BtoC emailing?
Good luck! I say that only because your very nice, important message is being sent among personal email, other marketers, and worst of all, dirty spammers. That and human’s schedules are very different than human business people schedules. Picking the kids up from hockey practice, getting a nice family dinner time, grocery shopping, TV watching, and everything else that normal people do, their time is very limited but valuable to you. I think emailing between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. is going to work better than other times of the day. Friday thru Sunday emails are the most effective, generally because those crazy humans are more likely to be online over the weekend and have more time to sit down and read your message.

Things to consider:

* Time zone you are in vs. your customers
* Your audience - only you know who your audience is - could they be the early birds or the night owls?
* Your message - is it time sensitive?

This is a quick and dirty run down from our experience. We can’t guarantee that this will make a difference but we believe it to be true. I sure hope this has been helpful and if anyone has anything else they’d like to ask, please email me at jgray@icontact.com.

[Source: Jeffery Grey - icontact.com - May 2008]