One of the most common questions I've heard is, what's the best time to send emails? Tuesdays eight to 10am? Eastern Standard Time is not the answer, because it is completely dependent and different with each company and audience. The answer lies within your company's unique data. You hold the power to knowing that best time and how do you do it, you should establish a baseline by looking at your highest engagement rates from existing standards. You'll measure the highest engagement from your open rates, and then separately, your click through rates.

Remember, your baseline will change. So definitely be open to testing which we'll review in a later lesson. So within your email platform, you'll have some nice reporting capabilities. Sorry for how ugly this example here is. But just for ultra simplicity, let's assume you've just sent your first five campaigns and you only sent them during the week, not on the weekend, you'll see that on Mondays and Fridays, your open rate was significantly higher compared to the midweek. Separately, you'll see that Monday's click through rate is by far the best.

Now, engagement rates like this will vary depending on a lot of different factors, subject lines, email content offer copy. For the purpose of this example, we can see that Monday is the best day to send emails. In reality, you'll definitely want to use many more data points and a much larger sample set than just five campaigns. But if you're just starting out, this is how it would go. So from here, your baseline will change as you deploy more campaigns. Your goal is to look for that sweet spot.

Keep deploying keep gathering your data and oh time you'll start to see trends. If you're lucky enough to work with a data analytics team, definitely engage them. Those who are educated in this topic and read data much more accurately, they'll also tell a much different story than someone who doesn't have that background or education. So let's say you don't have a team of data scientists at your disposal, no problem. Maybe you have a friend who loves numbers and data, maybe you can take this friend out for coffee and get their help. If this is a portion of managing your email program that you're pretty uncomfortable with.

Basically, the key is to just continually test you know, watch your numbers, and make sure that you're forming a conclusion or an assumption. Once you reach something called statistical significance, which essentially just means you have enough data to make meaning of it. Let's say that you've been deploying email campaigns for about a year. At that point, you've got a good chunk of data to play with. And once you start testing, just make sure not to fall into that trap of forming a conclusion too soon, it is really tempting to do that. But you do need to reach that point of statistical significance.

If you don't know how long that testing time period should be. Using three months as a baseline is a really good start. Now, just to note about frequency and cadence, so frequency is the number of emails and in particular time period, and cadence is the timing and pattern of sending those emails. So again, even with frequency and cadence, you'll want to establish what that sweet spot is for your individual company. And this will vary with, again, every company and every audience. You can establish what that is by using your data in conjunction With your goals, you may not know what your goal should be.

So if you're in that position, a good starting point may be to see how the competition is doing. So sign up for their emails, see how often they're sending. And you can gain a lot of cool insights into what's important to your competitors based on what they're displaying in their emails. Let's use a specific example to determine how you can identify the sweet spot for your own email frequency. So let's say you have a goal to increase website visitation by 15% in six weeks, it's a lofty goal. So you know that every time you send an email, it's spikes of traffic on your website, or perhaps your app or wherever you're leading to.

So if you typically send once a week, then your test now is to start sending twice a week and to see what those results will look like. This is in fact, a real world example that my team and I had conducted several times in a couple of different luxury hotel companies. In fact, the sweet spot in that space was no more than once a week. And we did not have to test this for three months, for instance, in order to see really, really strong results. So when we deploy twice a week, we saw a huge spike in unsubscribes. And engagement rates such as opens and click throughs went down.

Which at that point, after deploying that test only a few times, you just abandon, there's absolutely no need to continue that on for a full three months. Sometimes it's helpful to imagine the actual recipients of your email program. So I would imagine the recipients of the luxury hotel space to be these gentlemen. Now let's get a closer look. And really try to paint a picture of who these men are. They are very, very busy.

We know this, they're moving from place to place, it's raining, you've got to protect your suit. Because you're walking into an important meeting, you have to dress to impress. And you also can't be missing important email notifications or any updates from other your office or your clients. So you're constantly checking emails. In my real world example, for instance, when we were emailing this guy, especially the man to the right, more often than usual, he was one of the many that immediately unsubscribed, we again didn't have to test for long to see that increase our frequency immediately had a negative impact. And it's not just about losing subscribers.

It was more the fact that our audience was saying it was simply too much and too often. So we stopped. For instance, If you see no real change, I would advise absolutely tested for a while until you see a trend that your deployment behavior is making a change to your recipients behavior. Now, the timing and pattern of your email sends is also important. This is defined as your cadence. So for instance, a lot of ski resorts may only send during preseason or in season.

But the thing is I espies. Again, Internet service providers, they're constantly monitoring your scent history as well as your patterns. So if there's a period of time where you're not sending any emails, and you go dormant, but then all of a sudden, it's preseason and you start sending to an email list of 100,000 people you will be flagged as a potential scammer. The reason why they monitor emailer so closely is because there are hundred billion spam messages that are sent every single day which is absolutely insane. So it's their job to eliminate those from hopefully reaching our inboxes