I read a very interesting article the other day on the Marketing Sherpa blog highlighting how social media and email work together. Some of the takeaways that stuck with me are statistics that were found in Merkle’s study “View from the Social Inbox 2010”:
- 42% of social media users check their email four times a day or more as opposed to 27% of those that do not use social media
- 63% indicated that their email address for social media is the same for opt-in permission based email
What does this mean and how do they relate to each other?
First the obvious: social media users are two times more likely to be checking their email at least four times per day, disproving the long standing notion that email deployment should only occur Monday – Friday and in the morning.
Since social media users are regularly checking their inbox, email campaigns can be deployed at non-traditional times (evenings and weekends), with greater confidence that they will be viewed, and even better, acted upon.
For example, if a restaurant would like to offer a special for the weekend, they can deploy an email Friday afternoon knowing customers on their distribution lists will view their email.
Given this information, experimenting with non-traditional email send times can dramatically increase the ROI of certain campaigns.
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