Ep. 189 - NEW DATA: What is BEST TIME to Send EMAIL? 😳 Starbucks dude loses it! ☕️Ask Us ANYTHING

0:08We are back for Ask Us Anything from the Do This Not That Podcast presented by Marigold. This is our short episode where all week long we get in work questions and we get in ridiculous questions. And we try to tackle one of each. And if you're interested in submitting a question, that would be amazing. You just go to jschwedelson.com. You click the button that says podcast and then you click the button that says ask us anything. And we love getting crazy questions. Anything is cool, fun, whatever. So let's jump into it. Let's do the work question this week first. We got a question from Becky from Minneapolis.

0:41Love Minneapolis. You know why I love Minneapolis? because everyone there is nice. Everybody in the Midwest is nice. People in Wisconsin are nice. People in Minnesota and people in Ohio are nice. Everybody's nice. Everybody in the East Coast, I'm from the East Coast. I can say this. We're rude. We're just rude people. We are New York, New Jersey, the whole thing. And you know what? I moved down to South Florida like 30 years ago. And I will tell you, it carries the same thing down here. All the East Coasters moved to the East Coast of Florida. Okay. And everybody that lives near me and like Boca Tone, they're rude.

1:13Everybody's rude. But then all the Midwesterners, they move to the west coast of Florida, like Naples and St. Petersburg, and everybody there is very nice. So if you're thinking about moving, you don't want to be my neighbor because everybody here is, I know that I'm going to make a lot of enemies in saying this, but Midwestern people are nice. Anyway, Becky, what's your question? Hope it's a nice question. Jay, here's my question. Jay, my team keeps falling behind on getting our email marketing emails out at the time we know is best for them to perform. And then we wind up debating if we should just send it out, even though it's later in the day, or should we just wait till the next day when it's going to be at the perfect time?

1:54What do you think? Well, this is a great question because this is going to allow me to expose a myth about the best times to send out your email marketing campaigns. Everyone's like, oh, wow, I hear this all the time, right? We get our highest email open rate or our highest click-through rate when we send our emails out at 10 a.m. or 8 a.m. or 11 a.m. So we always send it out at that time. So based on some new research that we've done, we realized that this is actually a mistake. This is a mistake. All right, so we did this big test, okay? And we took 20 different clients from our Demand Gen marketing agency.

2:33We took 10 consumer clients and 10 business marketing clients that were running campaigns at scale, email marketing campaigns at scale, where they're emailing out promotional offers. So this has nothing to do with your newsletter. And so these 20 brands are sending out their emails. And what we did was we split all of their campaigns into an A-B test. So 50-50 splits on the email sends that they were doing. And for one half of the population, for all these different marketers, we sent out their promotions at the exact same time every day for the offer that they were promoting. And then for the other half of the people in the database, we changed the send time for each send that we did, and we made them at least four hours different than the original time.

3:18So if let's say it was at 10 a.m. one day, the next day when we did the send, it would be at 3 p.m. And what we found, which is wild, was that by not sending at the same time every time you hit send. It actually increased conversions a lot. Okay, let me dig into that with you for a second. This is not, again, this is not your newsletter. This is for promotional emails when you have an offer, right? Whether you're a business marketer or a consumer marketer. Here's what we found, that any campaign that is doing at least three touches for the same offer, right? Meaning, let's say you have a webinar and you're sending out three emails over, let's say, two weeks at least, maybe you send four, maybe you send five, but at least three over two weeks to promote that webinar, or you have a direct consumer, you know, clothing item or something, and you're sending out at least three emails promoting, you know, 30 % off on that particular offer over two weeks.

4:15Maybe you're sending out more than three, but at least three. What we found is that by having emails being sent at least four hours apart from each other on the opposite days, on the different days, it increased conversion rates by over 22 % than if all the sends were at the same time for the entire email marketing promotion of that offer. I know that that's kind of confusing, but basically what we're saying is you send out your email today to promote your webinar, okay you send out at 10 a.m and then two days from now you're going to do oh time's running out you're going to send out another email to promote it instead of sending out at 10 a.m you'll send out at 3 p.m okay and then that third email you do a totally different time right maybe you do an 8 a.m right and you have all these different times why though why would it be that if you know 10 a.m is the day that it works out the best and that's when your highest opens and clicks why would you get a higher conversion by not sending it out at that time.

5:16And here's the big myth I want to expose, okay? When you send out your email at 10 a.m., certain people that read their email at that time are opening it and clicking on it. But there's another population of people in your database that read their emails, let's say, at 3 p.m., their promotional emails at 3 p.m., at a totally different time of the day. Maybe some read them at 6 a.m. And when you send out that email at 3 p.m. instead of 10 a.m., you may actually see a lower open rate and click-through rate than at the best time, your 10 a.m. But what we found is the 3 p.m. people, it is a different population of people.

5:59So the myth is, oh, let's send it out. We get our highest open and click-through rate. No, you want to mix it up so that way you're getting in aggregate, you're getting more people exposed to it. So that's why you have to always look at your conversion performance and not just your highest open rate and click-through rate at a given time. Because when you mix it up, you're going to allow other people who have different habits be exposed to your marketing offers. And back to your original question, should you send it out if you miss that window of time? A hundred billion percent. Here's a rule I live by.

6:32When in doubt, send it out. Who cares? It's one email. Nobody even remembers it. But if you don't send it out, that person's not going to open it. That person's not going to click on it. That person is not going to get exposed to your offer. So just send it out. Maybe it won't do as well as you like, but you'll get something benefit out of it. You'll get no benefit if you don't send it. That much I can tell you. All right, before we get into the ridiculous question, I know that was confusing. I really do. But I'm really just trying to open your eyes to this idea of there being one time is the perfect time.

7:00that's garbage. It's just not true. All right. I want to let you know that this podcast is exclusively presented by Marigold. Marigold is my email sending platform. I send all my emails through Marigold. I send over 6 billion consumer and business emails. You need to check them out at meetmarigold.com, but they have a new piece of content that is awesome. It is called the five steps for selecting the right email marketing platform. It's a free guide. I know you don't even like your platform. So wouldn't it be nice to have a guide? And this thing is not a sell sheet for Marigold. It's for any time you're thinking about what I need to be asking when I'm exploring a new platform.

7:37If you want this thing, you go to jschwedelson.com slash Marigold. That is jschwedelson.com slash Marigold. It is free. It is awesome. Check it out. All right, let's get into the ridiculous question. We got a question in from Ryan from Denver. Ryan, what is your question? Jay, what is your Starbucks order? All right. Well, let me tell you about that. Oh, meanwhile, I went to Starbucks the other day and the weirdest thing happened, the absolute weirdest thing happened. So I'm online behind this dude. Okay. And I don't go to Starbucks every day. I don't know why once every two weeks, whatever it is.

8:15So I'm online behind this dude and the barista, that's like the person that helps you behind the counter says to this guy uh what can i get you today and the guy says seriously you know i'm here every day uh what are you talking about i get a venti americano or whatever he said i get it every day and he was rude he's probably an east coaster there you go and he was pissed and then then the barista said oh my god i'm so sorry and then she said the worst thing she goes and what what is the name for the order? I was like, yes, this is going to be amazing because this guy's head is going to pop off his shoulders.

8:52And he lost it. And he goes, are you hitting me? I'm here every single day. It's Mike G or whatever he said. And he goes, is this a prank or something? How do you not remember me? And he was so pissed. I was like, dude, you're a loser. You're an actual loser. You're yelling at this nice person because they didn't know that Mike G orders an Americano. Get a life, you loser. Oh my goodness. And they screw up my name all the time. I care less. They'll write, oh, I say it's J. They go, oh, this is for Jerry. One time they wrote, hey, instead of J. I don't care. You call me a Mr. Potato Man. I don't give a crap what you say.

9:33It's fine with me. Anyway, back to your question. What is my order? I have a hack. So I always get a Pike Place coffee and here's why. It actually is not the best thing. It's not the thing I think tastes the best at all, not by a long shot. It's like a regular coffee. But the reason I would get a Pike Place is, and you maybe know this, but the secret hack is the barista, the barista, whatever you call it, the person who takes your order, when you order a Pike Place, they make it for you on the spot. It doesn't go into like the lineup of everything else they're working on. They literally stop what they're doing and they make it and they hand it to you.

10:07So you never actually have to wait for them to make it. So because I'm incredibly lazy and I don't want to wait for anything, I order a Pike Place, even though it's not my favorite thing, because it's the fastest coffee you can get at Starbucks. There you go. Who knew? Anyway, what did we talk about today? I actually have no idea, but I appreciate you being here. Please, two things. You're hanging up. You're not on the phone. You're stopping listening. Don't stop listening. Number one, leave this review. If you leave a review, it gets circulated. More people get exposed to my nonsense, and you are then awesome.

10:35Number two, Guru Conference is the world's largest email marketing event. It is free and is virtual. And you got to be there. It's coming up in a few weeks, October 16th and 17th. And we buy a certain number of virtual seats. I keep saying this, we're about to run out. And Sarah Jessica Parker is going to be there. I'm going to be there. That's a fail. Amy Porterfield, Anne Hanley, all these big brands. Skims is speaking there. Jim Shark, DocuSign, you name it. GuruConference.com. It is free. It is virtual. It's going to be fun. I promise. All right. See you there. Later. You did it. You made it to the end.

11:10Nice. But the party's not over. Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers. And hook us up with a five-star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time. Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100 % free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Damon John, Martha Stewart, and me. Guruevents.com. Check it out.