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Ask HN: best hours to send invite emails?

3 points by zalew ↗ HN
What is the best time of day to send subscribed users an email, inviting them to register on the website? Are there any case studies on that, or do you have any AB tested experience how it converts?

Morning? After work? Evening after prime time? Other...? Content newsletters are usually sent in the morning (when people read fresh daily news), not sure if that's the case with converting users to perform actions on websites.

7 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 35.5 ms ] thread
federicola
First you need to know what kind of customer you are targeting, for example if you're emailing to usa the majority of the population lives in the EST zone. Focus your emails on hitting that time zone (unless you have the capability to segment your list by geographic location and send in staggered sends). Weekends are not good. Mondays are also not good, I frequently use Mondays to delete all spam and junk or unimportant emails. Probably Wednesdays, Thursdays are the best days of the week.
zalew
time zone aware obviously, yes.
federicola
My personal experience, some years ago I was doing some working for a government agency which needed to send dome emails to users, we found that at midday we were receiving approx. 75% of all answers to the email campaign. Which kind of service are you promoting? Do you have age-segments?
zalew
I expect the most common age span around 21-35ish, tech savvy, not limited by any profession at all, and the website focuses around lifestyle/hobby, so there is no specific business activity to tie it to. Govt agency - must be bored at work during mid-day I guess :) I've just started gathering subscribes, so I got some time to research the habits. I'm trying to analyze activity on discussion groups, maybe that will give me some hints.
federicola
Yes, do your homework, research user home countries, habits. Try to make your email to be a rich html with a short abstract of your product/service, then provide a link to your page with the user encrypted in a variable in the URL, so you can track exactly who enters your website because of the email.

You can also try some hack advantage scripts embedded in the email, some scripts can be activated when the user opens the email.

Important,before starting an email campaign, you should ask your users when they register or in the settings website page the "do you want to receive notifications, promotions blah blah blah", and also make sure they can "unsubscribe" with a link in your email(you will also can catch user information).

Changing topic, nice pics you have in flickr

zalew
yeah, I know, I will build campaign tracking links for everything.

thanks for your advice.

> Changing topic, nice pics you have in flickr

tx :)