When is the Best Time to Send an Eblast?

Knowing when to send your bulk email is crucial for optimizing how many people see your content and increasing deliverability.

Most email marketing campaigns are sent between 8-10 AM on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. However, sending your eblast with everyone else might discourage your message being opened. Statistics are showing that there are other time windows that show better open rates (percentage of recipients that open your message).

  • Weekends see the least amount of emarketing, but these emails typically get the highest open and click through rates (click through rate is the percentage of recipients that click on the links in your message). The weekends are a good time to send out your email campaigns because you’ll have little competition for your recipient’s attention.
  • Messages sent late at night, between 8-12 pm, have a high 22.7% open rate, compared to the usual 17% when sent in the daytime. Click through rates were higher too.
  • No one time/day is perfect for everybody. Try analyzing your recipients and thinking about when they would be most likely to open emails. Send your emails at different times to compare and see what time works best for your business.

reference:
Quarterly Email Benchmark Study

http://www.iab.net/media/file/emailmarketingquarterlybenchmarkstudyq42013.pdf

 

PBE Eblast Analytics

Who is Opening Your Email Blasts?

See who is or isn’t receiving your Eblasts, opening your messages, or clicking on the links inside.

Click to learn more…

 

Keep an Eye on Your Unsubscribers & Re-Engage Them

After you send a bulk email, see who unsubscribes and possibly reengage with them.

Click to learn more…

Keep an Eye on Your Unsubscribers & Re-engage Them

From the PBE (“Personalized Bulk Email”) Sent Items page, you can manage the email recipients that have unsubscribed.

After clicking on PBE sent items under the customer tab (shown below), click on the envelope icon (below the ‘to’ column) by any message to view the addresses it was sent to.

A subscription icon will appear next to each email address. Just like on the customer tab, clicking on the icon will show their subscription status as well as an email template you can send asking the receiver to resubscribe.
IT IS BEST to do this while you’re on a call with the respective recipient, otherwise this may be considered further spamming. The same approach should be considered daily when engaging your customers (from the customer tab).

Note: Any email addresses with an unsubscribed icon does not necessarily mean that they unsubscribed from the same e-blast.

Who is Opening Your Email Blasts?

Showroom Exchange allows you to view the statistics of your sent personalized bulk emails (PBE), such as open-rate, click-through rate, and bounced emails.

From the Customer tab, click “PBE sent items” to show a list of all of your showroom’s most recent e-blasts.

Click on the pie chart to see the statistics of the respective e-blast.

 

After clicking on the pie chart, you can view a break down of how your recipients have engaged with your message. It is best to view the chart 24 to 48 hours after sending, as recipients rarely open e-blasts immediately.

Out of the total messages sent, you can see how many were delivered and how many bounced. Delivery does not suggest the recipient has viewed the e-blast.

The next section breaks down the bounced emails, showing why the messages did not reach the recipients.

Open Statistics shows how many recipients opened the email and how many clicked on embedded links (if any).

By clicking on the number next to a statistic, you can view the associated email addresses. In the example below, clicking on the 3 next to “Recipients Opened” shows the three addresses that opened this email.

sent pbe3

Eliminate “a_service_of@showroomexchange.com” from e-blasts

If you’re not using a free web-based email service provider,* such as hotmail.com, outlook.com, gmail.com etc. (aol & yahoo are exceptions) i.e.; if you’re using your own domain similar to anyname.com, your_company_name.com or your_showroom_name.com, you can avoid sending e-blasts that say…

FROM: your_name@your_company_name.com (sent on behalf of a_service_of@showroomexchange.com)

and with a couple of steps, your e-blast recipients will see your YOUR address in the FROM field, without any mention of “a_service_of@showroomexchange.com”:

FROM: your_name@your_company_name.com

.

2 STEPS:

** The following instructions are technical. The person who maintains your registrar should be familiar with them. Alternatively, you can contact the registrar’s technical support team. **

STEP I:
Ask the person who maintains your domain name records to add the contents in the parenthesis #A to your zone file’s SPF record:

#A (include:mta.showroomexchange.com)
NOTE: (~all) is recommended instead of (-all)

If an SPF record does not already exist, one must be created.

If you’re not sure who your registrar is, visit www.godaddy.com/whois to look-up your domain name and look for the line identified with “Registrar“.

 

STEP II:

When the change is completed on your end, email help@readytoview.com. We will use the following tools/web-links to verify the same:

http://mxtoolbox.com/spf.aspx
http://www.kitterman.com/spf/validate.html

Once verified, we’ll flip a switch on our end and ask you to logout/login once.
With your next login your e-blasts will originate from your company email address.

 

* related:

http://blog.showroomexchange.com/dmark-policy/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework

AOL and Yahoo have changed their ‘Email Routing Policy’

 

  • IF YOU’RE USING YOUR OWN DOMAIN NAME, SKIP THIS POST.
  • IF YOU’RE NOT USING …@aol.com or …@yahoo.com, SKIP TO ‘SUGGESTION’

A few weeks ago, Yahoo and very recently AOL changed their DMARC policy to stop fraudulent emails.

How does this affect Showroom Exchange subscribers who use the e-blast (PBE) feature?
All e-blast senders that use a ‘From’ address with …@aol.com or …@yahoo.com will not be able to test their e-blasts. AOL & Yahoo will reject the inbound tests. Also, their deliverability will be negatively impacted.

WORKAROUND:
We recommend using your own domain (e.g.; your_company_name.com) instead of yahoo.com, aol.com or other Majour-Email-Service-Provider.com.

HOW:
If you need help registering a new domain and/or setting up email addresses for an existing domain, please contact your I.T. adviser.

SUGGESTION:
It won’t be long before other ISPs, such as Gmail, Hotmail & Outlook, make DMARC policy changes similar to YAHOO & AOL. So don’t replace AOL or Yahoo with Gmail or another majour email hosting service. Establish your own domain name.

Does the DMARC policy change impact deliverability for my recipients (retail stores that use AOL or yahoo), if I’m already using a non-AOL or non-yahoo domain?
No.

more about DMARC policy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMARC

Personalized Bulk Email Tracking

Showroom Exchange now allows you to track the deliverability of your personalized bulk emails. Check to see if your recipients opened your email campaign and view the click through rate for embedded links that they may have clicked.

Once your campaign is submitted it takes 1-2 hours from the time the recipient opens or clicks on the link for the stats to be populated. For this reason it is best to check campaign stats starting at least 4 hours after submission. Consider checking the stats for the same campaign at different times to track progress.

To track your email campaign, hover your mouse over “Customers” and click on “PBE sent items.”

PBE Sent Items

 

 

Click on the stats icon (pie graph) for your email campaign stats.

PBE Pie Chart Icon

 

 

Notice the “Overview”, “Open Stats” and “Link/Click stats” tabs (see screenshot below). The “Overview” tab covers the delivered and bounced rate of your email as well as general open and click statistics.

You can click on the number of Recipients Opened/Click to get more details on who specifically opened and displayed images or clicked on your links.

pbe.stats1

 

 

From the “Open Stats” tab you’ll be able to see your open statistics in more detail. You will be able to see unique v. total opens (definitions are on this tab).

pbe.stats2

 

 

On the “Click Stats” tab, you can see you click stats in more detail. Not only can you see unique v. total clicks, but you can see a unique/total click break down for each of the links within your email.

pbe.stats3

 

 

Click on the number to see who exactly clicked on the link.

pbe.stats4

 

IMPORTANT: Please understand that the open rate is not a 100% accurate measure. The “open” % rate is available only if the recipients email is capable of displaying html with images, and the “View Images” option is turned on when they view your email. If the recipient opens the email but does not allow displaying of images; stats cannot be logged. Link tracking is logged when the recipient clicks on any of your embedded links.

 

Definitions:
Subject: the subject for your PBE.
Sent: date and time sent.
PBE content: a copy of your sent PBE.
Total customer: the customers you chose to send to.
Total custom recipients: emails that you manually entered (not an existing customer record).
Total sent: count/percentage of total emails sent.
Delivered: count/percentage of emails delivered.
Bounced: count/percentage of emails bounced due to the following reasons below.
Bad address: count/percentage of recipients with incorrect email addresses.
Temporary error: count/percentage of recipients who may or may not receive your PBE. This condition applies to recipients whose mail servers remain (at the time of viewing the stats) unresponsive. No later than 5 days from the time the PBE was sent, these values should become bad address, spam complaint, other errors or delivered messages.
Spam complaint: count/percentage of recipients who marked your PBE as spam. This is most commonly done with the respective email program’s “this is spam”, “mark as spam” or “block all emails from this user”, etc.
Other: percentage of customers who did not receive your PBE that is not classified in the reasons above.