Ever considered ‘triggered’ or ‘persona-based’ segmented email campaigns to pump up response?

A recent study by Marketing Sherpa http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30305 (and yes I know there are many more!) showed the impact of changing email campaign distribution times from late afternoon to early morning, with the services company in question seeing a fairly instant 15% increase in clickthrough rates.

Expert thinking on the best time to distribute email campaigns can radically differ. We’ve all developed our ‘best practice knowledge’ based on things we have read and picked up along the way, combined with our own experiences in pushing the button. The problem is that there isn’t one generic best time to press the send button to optimise CTRs, as each data list we use is different, and each person we mail to is also different in terms of personal preferences. So the only real way to identify how your individual lists best respond to timing is to test the theory and keep testing, adapting to the findings of your analysis on a campaign by campaign basis.

I have a few thoughts however in terms of testing out your own data response. Maybe you can look to send out emails to smaller grouped lists based on the time of day the subscriber opted into your list, or perhaps the time that they opened your last email communication. By identifying this ‘individual send time’ and being able to mail out on this basis you may well see a dramatic increase in your email metrics. Maybe you can also consider when people visit your website according to what your analytics tell you, and factor this into your email distribution timings. So that you say split your lists into evening browsers, early birds,' lunch at desk' browsers and even weekend browsers – a more persona-based, approach than a rough cut data segmentation method. If you don’t have access to such trend data, then why not do some random testing, splitting your data into ‘best guess’ persona groups based on when they signed up to your list and take it from there. Refining and refining again based on CTs and interation.

Another way of course is to allow recipients to decide when they want to receive emails themsleves at point of sign-up. This idea of ‘triggered emails’ is not revolutionary and the concept has proven most successful in highly personalised b2b communications within the technology sector, or so I'm told by a number of digital gurus. It does however depend on your data quality and your internal system’s ability to record events which then trigger an email to be distributed. You can even tie browser interest into event triggered emails so that whenever a registered visitor to your website stays on a certain page for a preset amount of time, an email is auto generated to do a quick survey, offer assistance or more information about what they were looking at in order to help them make a purchase decision. Basic marketing automation in another guise, without the hefty outlay!

These are just a few thoughts from me, but I would be interested to hear from you if you have any other ideas to share or sound advice based on widely tested principles. Go get trigger-happy!