Normally I write a newsletter and send it out once it’s done right away. I’m hardly an expert, we’ve only sent six.
This time I though we’d try something new. Apparently the best time to send mails is around 10am, I guess more people are at their desk and more likely to open them but this is tricky to time when you have a massive list of mails.
MailChimp does have a “Send with Timewarp” Feature and also “Let MailChimp optimize time for maximum engagement” but these are both paid for options….
Instead what I did was export my list to excel and reorder the list by the recipients time zones. This idea isn’t perfect and about 2/5 of my list didn’t have that as an option, but it was a start. I suspect a lot of these were due to the fact that I imported my list from another program.
I wrote my campaign as a template and then was able to schedule each major time zone list to land at approximately 10am. The unknown timezone addresses I sent at 6pm GMT, which was 10am on the US west coast. Most of the list are Americans and Europeans so this is a reasonable guess.
The last three campaigns have had a 50% open rate over all, so I will report back in a week or so if this has improved. It took about 10 minutes to paste in all the values but if it drives up the engagement it might be worth the extra effort.
