How to ensure your emails don’t get lost in the retail email crush
- Here are the best times to send business emails from Thanksgiving through New Years.
- Emails sent on Mondays have the highest ROI; those sent on Fridays have a higher click-through rate.
- Review our tips for subject lines, images, content and more.
Is the end of the year staring you in the face and you haven’t yet made your quota? Or do you have important information to share with your policyholders and you want to ensure they see and read your information? Or do you just want to send holiday greetings and a big thank you to your clients?
Hubspot has determined the best times to send your email during the holiday seasons to drastically improve your open rates. They looked at 4.5 MILLION emails to determine just how the holidays impact emails, to see how your email can all too easily get lost in the shuffle of holiday shopping emails. We’ve summarized their findings below, along with other insurance agency email tips during the holidays.
Best times to send business emails Nov. – Jan.
Beginning the day before Thanksgiving, there’s a six percent decline in email opens, which lasts until Dec. 1. Open rates climb back up to normal the week after Thanksgiving, when everyone is back at work. Then, the week leading up to Christmas showed an even higher than average open rate, up another six percent.
That comes to a dead stop on Christmas Eve, with 42 percent less email opens. Of course, opens were way down on Christmas Day (72 percent), but on the following 2 days, they were still down more than 33 percent. In fact, the week between Christmas and New Year’s, on average, 58 percent fewer emails are opened. After New Year’s Day, email open rates surged again. It just makes sense: people are settling back into their work routine.
In light of this data, here’s what you should do:
- Send your emails 24 hours before Thanksgiving eve, or wait until the week afterwards
- Send your emails the week before Christmas, when open rates are higher than average
- Wait and send emails four days after New Year’s
Want to see the actual Hubspot stats? Click here.
Other insurance agency email tips
Outside of the holidays, what’s the best time to send emails? Short answer is, it varies. You simply need to experiment to see not only which email days and times have the highest open rate – but also which ones have the best click-through rates. For instance, Vertical Response found that emails sent on Mondays have the highest ROI, but those sent on Fridays had a higher click-through rate.
Weekends have much lower open rates, but even higher click-through rates. What does this mean? While fewer people opened your emails, those who did were much more likely to engage with your email and click through to your website or whatever link you provided.
Here are the last of our insurance agency email tips:
- Be sure your emails are easily viewed on mobiles, because more than half of all emails are now being read on smartphones and tablets (and the number is rising). So be sure your call-to-action is prominent and links are clear and easy to click.
- Campaign Monitor recommends using web-friendly fonts, because text is smaller on your cellphone. They suggest using Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana or Georgia, and increase your font size for easy viewing.
- Campaign Monitor also reminds us that 33 percent of subscribers decide whether or not to open your email based on your subject line – so choose it carefully. Most email clients impose a maximum length of 255 characters, so keep it as short as you can.
- Mailmodo recommends using good-quality images with small file sizes, creating enticing email copy and a clear CTA (call-to-action button) so that your readers know what their next step should be.
- Track individually who opens and clicks through your email, so that you can respond one-on-one, moving them individually through the sales funnel based on their prior behaviors, rather than lumping everyone together and blasting with another email.