You schedule the email delivery to some or all of the members of your lists. You may choose to have different newsletters to go out at predetermined times.
Don't Worry, It's Just a Plan
There are major events in our lives and minor events that take a major effort. Mostly all of them take some kind of thought and at least a few reminders to do them. Running away from a bear when you see one? Maybe you only think about that once and do it. Changing phone service to a better plan or trying a new restaurant might take a few mentions. Please note the specific definition of email marketing campaign.
An email marketing campaign is just one in a series of newsletters that you send to a list of clients. Each new newsletter that is created and sent to a list (or lists) is considered a new campaign.
How Scheduling Works
Some people like to create their email marketing when they feel inspired and send it all out within a few minutes of finishing. There's nothing wrong with that if that's how you work, but you should at least know that you can schedule your emails and that there is a knowledge base of scheduling best practices.
As you create your email, you can choose what day and time you'd like to send it. You can also save it as a draft so that you can put off deciding when to send it until later on. If you've taken advantage of list segmentation for
targeted email marketing, you can duplicate your email and send it to one list at a specific time and another part of your list later on.
Scheduling Best Practices
There are some things that are just plain common sense. You don't want to send email newsletters to business contacts on the weekends if you only have their office email address. But there are some tidbits of experience that can help even those who are the brightest:
Weekday Emails
Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are the best weekdays to deliver your campaigns. Monday is too busy as it starts the week, and Friday sometimes is not the most productive day because it starts the weekend.
Sunday Instead of Saturday
Saturday is just too deep in the weekend to be a prime emailing day. But recent studies have shown that not only is Sunday the best weekend day, it's actually one of the best days of the whole week on which to send out newsletters. More and more, people are using Sunday to check on email and shop online.
Send Often...But Not Too Often
We mentioned this before, but it is very applicable here. If you wait too long to send your first email or let too much time lapse between your newsletters, your previously eager list may just change their
minds about your communications or might be not as responsive as they once were. They might totally forget that they subscribed to you and regard your out-of-the-blue email as spam. Don't forget that they signed up for newsletter because they want information. This is why permission is so important: You only have people on your list who are anticipating information from you.
The last thing you want to do is burn your list out. There's also the question of ROI – Return On Investment. Although email marketing is very inexpensive, there is some cost. If you send out too many emails and your response stagnates, you could be wasting money and time. Worse yet, you could be perceived as spamming, even though you have permission to send the person email.
If your email marketing company has a great
autoresponder feature, you'll have the benefit of a "set it and forget it" approach for your email campaigns.
Whereas scheduling means you manually choose dates to send out your individual newsletters, an autoresponder works by setting up your newsletters to go out so many days after a subscriber performs an action (like signing up, taking a survey, etc.)
Here's an Example:
You set up four different email marketing newsletters to go out to people who use your sign up box. The first day, a welcome email goes out. On day five, they receive a discount coupon. Day ten sees them getting a detailed newsletter that functions as a service or product catalog. On day fifteen, a customer survey is automatically sent out. You only have to set this up once and the campaign automatically is in play for as long as you like.
