In marketing, timing is everything. This is especially true for marketing mediums like email, where the time of day can affect how likely someone is to read or respond to your message.
Therefore, you must send marketing emails at the proper time. This is where email scheduling comes into play, assisting you in reaching the appropriate people in an adequate time with your message.
Please continue reading to learn more about email scheduling, including what it is, why it’s crucial, and how to do it with Outlook and Gmail.
Let’s get going.
What is Email Scheduling?
Setting up your emails to send out automatically at a specific time is known as email scheduling. So you can reach your audience when they’re most likely to view or open the email, you may schedule your emails to be sent out in bulk at a predetermined time.
For audiences in various time zones, you might even want to schedule your emails in separate batches so you can reach them at the best times. By doing this, you can streamline your marketing and communications while having more time to concentrate on other crucial facets of your company.
Even whether you’re away on a trip for pleasure or business, email scheduling is a great way to maintain involvement. This feature is available in well-known email clients like Gmail and Outlook, but you can also use email automation applications for more comprehensive scheduling.
Why You Need Email Scheduling
Email scheduling can help you in various ways, from increasing flexibility to engaging your receivers at the appropriate time. The following are some of the main justifications for scheduling your emails:
Improve Visibility and Interactions
There is the best time to distribute emails to recipients so that they receive them when they are most likely to open and interact with them, just like there is the best time to post on social media. By planning when to send them out, you may ensure better visibility and prevent your emails from getting lost in an extensive list of emails from other brands and companies.
Additionally, greater visibility enhances the likelihood that recipients will open your emails and read your messaging. This might encourage them even more, to click on your links, boosting various email engagement metrics.
Follow Up at the Right Time
Your average reaction rate might increase from 9% to 13% using follow-up emails. Sending a follow-up email or two could dramatically increase your chances of engaging recipients even if they don’t open or respond to your initial message.
Email follow-up with prospects can be timed so that you respond at the appropriate moment. This will help you stay in their minds and convert them into valuable clients or paying customers.
Beat Time Zone Challenges
You’ll probably be interacting with email receivers from across the nation unless you only operate a local firm. You might even be working with customers or clients from other countries.
This makes it difficult to send out a single batch of emails to ensure that each recipient receives them at the most advantageous moment because you will be sending your emails to people who are spread out across many time zones.
You can overcome this difficulty by planning your emails such that separate batches of emails go out at various times, allowing you to select the best send time for each time zone. To manually push your emails at the ideal send time for receivers in a different time zone, you won’t need to stay late or get up early.
As a result, you may go to bed at 9 EST while knowing that your emails will be sent to your receivers on the West Coast at 9 PST.
Organize Your Marketing Efforts
Your marketing efforts can stay more structured if you schedule your emails in advance. You can plan your emails in bulk rather than manually sending them throughout the day, freeing up time to concentrate on other crucial duties. Additionally, scheduling your emails provides you with greater schedule freedom.
You can plan your emails to ensure you’re still communicating with your recipients while you’re on vacation. This maintains the momentum, so you don’t have to start from scratch after taking a few days or weeks off.
How to Schedule Emails
Now that you are fully aware of the advantages of email scheduling, it is time to participate. We’ll review how to schedule emails in two well-liked email clients: Outlook and Gmail. The exact procedure might change if you use an email automation platform for email scheduling.
On Gmail
Step 1:
Click on the “Compose” button from the top left-hand corner of the screen.
Step 2:
Once the compose window appears, select the recipients for the email. Then draft your email exactly how you’d want it to go out. While you can go back and make edits later, finalizing the email copy during scheduling is essential so you don’t mistakenly send a rough draft to hundreds of recipients.
Step 3:
Click on the drop-down arrow next to the “Send” button and click on “Schedule send.”
Step 4:
To schedule your email, select from one of the predetermined times. Alternatively, you can choose “Pick date & time” and specify a specific time for your email to be sent.
This is a fantastic choice if you already know when to send emails most effectively or if you want to experiment with other times. That’s all; your email will now be sent at the time you specify.
The time displayed is based on your time zone, so keep that in mind. You must thus do the required time zone conversions and modify the send time accordingly if you want to send the email to recipients who are located in various time zones.
You can also adjust your scheduled emails by accessing them from the “Scheduled” tab on the left-hand panel. From here, you can filter the emails by sender, recipient, send time, etc.
On Outlook
Step 1:
From your Outlook inbox, click on the “New Email” button at the top left-hand corner.
Step 2:
Open the “Tags” menu in the Ribbon and select the arrow button to open more options. This will open up a window to customize your delivery options.
Step 3:
From the “Delivery options,” mark the box next to “Do not deliver before” and enter your preferred date and time.
Step 4:
Start writing your email after closing the menu. Then click “Send” to have your email sent out automatically at the time you chose.
By navigating to your Outbox, you can modify the email, and the time it will be sent. Repeat the above steps for the delayed email that you wish to change.
Guidelines for Successful Email Scheduling
Even though email scheduling has many advantages, you won’t always get to take advantage of them. To get the most out of email scheduling, it’s crucial to adopt a strategic mindset. Schedule your emails according to the best practices below for the most significant outcomes.
Leverage Segmented Lists
Your email scheduling efforts can be more effectively organized if your subscribers are divided into pertinent lists.
The email opt-in, the pages they viewed, the time zone they are in, and other factors can all be used to segment your audience. This will enable you to create highly relevant communications that are aimed at the particular requirements or concerns of various consumer categories.
The sending of each email copy to the corresponding mailing list can then be scheduled. List-based segmentation of your recipients reduces the possibility of unintentionally omitting influential individuals while also assisting you in customizing your messaging.
Know the Optimal Send Time
What good is scheduling emails if they don’t arrive when their recipients are most likely to see them?
For your emails to be delivered to the appropriate recipients, be sure to choose the best time to schedule them. According to a CoSchedule review of 14 independent research, the best days to send emails are Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Wednesdays.
The optimum time of day is 10 AM, followed by 8 PM in terms of timing. 2 PM and 6 AM are some adequate periods for sending emails. Utilize these data to test various email send times to determine which one engages your target audience the most.
Don’t Spam
The best course of action may not always be sending emails as frequently as possible to catch people’s attention. If you send emails too frequently, your recipients can consider them spam and mark them as such rather than responding to them.
The last thing you want is this to happen because it can damage your email sender’s reputation. To ensure that you follow up at the appropriate times without bothering your receivers, you need to organize the sequence in which your emails are sent.
The appropriate frequency may change depending on the business and consumer segment. Most email marketing professionals send out their campaign emails weekly, but you’d want to test and see what frequency works best for you.
Test, Analyze, and Optimize
Finally, continually evaluate the results of your email strategy testing. This might help you with your optimization efforts and let you make the most delicate adjustments to your email marketing plan.
You can experiment with many aspects of your plan, such as the frequency and timing of your sends. To determine what resonates most with your audience, you should also think about testing the email copy and subject line.
Start Scheduling Your Emails
Email scheduling can yield many advantages if done correctly. It can help you save time and maintain a more organized approach to your internet marketing.
It can also assist you in reaching your audience at the appropriate time to increase opens and clicks. To begin, make sure you are adhering to the advice and recommendations provided above.
Conclusion
From a commercial standpoint, scheduling emails is crucial since it enables you to develop and maintain solid client relationships.
Email scheduling is a beautiful approach to Communicating with the same (prospect or current) client more than once; reminding clients that you’re there to assist them when needed; reminding clients that they have an appointment with you; and demonstrating to clients your concern for them (birthday emails accompanied with coupons or discounts, for example),
Encourage your clients to write reviews after using your goods or services.
Good luck to you!
Private Agent for Dropshipping Success