I send a lot of emails to the NoveList community, and for years prior I did email marketing for nonprofits, including my previous library. At first, I’m pretty sure I did not worry about when I sent an email for my library. "Day or time, why does it matter? Just get it sent!" It was the least of my worries.
However, I was dedicated to learning how to do email marketing, and I soon learned why timing is something to consider when planning an email. There are two methods you can use to figure out what day and time to send an email for your library.
Method #1: Use benchmarks as your ruler for success.
If you’re not sure where to start, use industry benchmarks to guide your decisions.
Research shows that people interact more with emails and social posts on certain days and at certain times. I follow Campaign Monitor for email timing benchmarks because it analyzes over 100 billion emails sent across its huge family of brands, and I highly recommend its annual benchmark report.
However, I’ve never seen libraries called out specifically as an industry in their report, so I recommend library marketers look at the data for Nonprofits, Education, or Government (especially if your library’s information is sent within municipal emails).
So, what do the benchmarks reveal?
- The best days to send email to your community of readers are weekdays. Tuesdays will give you the best open rates, and Thursdays are best for higher click-to-open rates. Click-to-open rates, or CTORs as they are often referred to, are the percentage of people who open your email and click on a link inside.
- The best times to send emails are between 10-11 a.m. and 2-3 p.m. within your time zone.
Method #2: Use your own data as your ruler for success.
The best research you can do is within your own data. I feel lucky to have the library email marketing platform LibraryAware which tracks analytics for me. Not every library has this ability! I used LibraryAware at my old library, and now I use it at NoveList. It enables me to make data-based decisions, which is as important to me now as it was then.
I get all my stats from LibraryAware and keep monthly records. Then, at the end of the year, I look for patterns that help me make decisions for the upcoming year.
When tracking your monthly stats, include the days and times you send emails. Look for patterns for when your community prefers to engage with you. You may find that your community does not follow the benchmarks… and that’s okay!
Here are some questions to ask of your own data regarding timing:
- Do we get more opens on certain days of the week? Certain times?
- Do we get higher click-to-open rates on certain days? Certain times?
- Does it seem like there’s any difference at all?
If you don’t have a library email marketing platform that gives you analytics, you’ll have to be a little more creative to understand how your email marketing efforts work. For example, getting more calls to the library for information about a program after an email goes out could be a sign that an email is effective, especially if it happens consistently. Make notes of these occurrences to start establishing a baseline of data.
Responding to the effectiveness of your day and time send
Let’s say you’ve been tracking your stats for a few months now, and want to see how the day and time affect your results (good call, you should!). By day, tally up the average open rates and average click-to-open rates of all your emails in the past several months. Repeat these same calculations for time. Look at your averages to determine if there appears to be a best day and best time to send emails.
What if you’ve got great open rates on Tuesdays and the best click-to-open rates on Thursdays — then what should you do? It depends on your goals. If you’re trying to convey information but don’t necessarily need your subscribers to act, then go with a Tuesday send. But if you need your subscribers to act on your email, send it on a Thursday.
If you want to try to use email timing to improve your open rates or click-to-open rates, here are some techniques:
- Try sending or posting “off the hour.” An email sent at 10:21 a.m. might perform better than one sent at 10 a.m. because it has a “there’s-a-real-person-on-the-other-end" feel to it.
- Don’t send your monthly newsletter on the first or last day of the month. Your email will be competing with everything else in the inbox. Consider sending it a week before that month starts, which is a good thing for anything happening earlier in the month.
I hope this helps you guide your send strategy for library email marketing. May you find the day and time that is best for your library!
Leigh Gaddy is the Lead/Demand Generation Marketing Specialist at NoveList. She is reading The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown.
