If you’ve avoided using email marketing up till now, I’m hoping this short story about a recent success gained from data analysis will change your mind.

Analytics may seem like a dirty word to technophobes, but in reality, it shines a light on the inner workings of online marketing campaigns. As we strive to update BannerOS here at BannerView.com, we’re constantly aware of the need to improve analytical offerings. Recently, BannerMailer, the email newsletter manager, received an update that included a useful Open Rate timeline graph. Visually, it provided an insight about subscriber preferences that I’ll now reveal to you.

Those of you that subscribe to the BV Buzz, our newsletter know that it’s sent once a month. We try to provide a monthly recap of the best stories both from the BannerBlog and industry related media outlets. With BannerMailer attached to a pretty robust web content management and analytics platform, we can learn a lot about our subscriber’s interests and (hopefully) needs as a potential customer.

For the BV Buzz, I usually schedule it to go out the last Tuesday of the month. Last month, I wanted to experiment with the last Wednesday of the month. That morning, I had it scheduled to go out at 8:30am PST. That way, when I came into the office that morning I could begin monitoring key metrics.

In other articles here on the BannerBlog, we’ve discussed some of the important metrics that you should be monitoring with your email marketing campaigns. To refresh, the top two metrics for anyone to observe:

Open Rate - How many people have opened your email message.

Click Thru Rate - How many recipients out of one hundred clicked a link in your email message. (BannerMailer will actually provide not only the links clicked, but a profile of the ‘clickee’ as well, that will detail activity associated with their current and previous visits.)

With the addition of the Open Rate timeline graph, I am able to see over a set period when the open rate activity is greatest and how quickly it tapers off.

With this newsletter, we had an issue with it being delivered in a timely manner. If you can’t tell from the graph above, it took about six hours for the newsletter to get to our almost 60K subscribers. Because of the length of delivery time, some of our subscribers didn’t receive it early Wednesday morning. Now, if you look at the chart you’ll see two spikes; one at around 2:30pm and another at around 4:30am Thursday Pacific Standard Time.

The first spike makes sense. It was the second one that at first seemed an anomaly. I know most of our loyal subscribers are based in Vegas, a 24/7 town, but I doubt we’d see that much activity from business owners at that time. Remembering we had a demographic of subscribers on the East coast from a campaign we did awhile back, I did a little digging. As that spike would correlate with 7:30am EST, I could safely attribute it to our East coast subscribers.

What does that information do for me as a marketing professional?

One, it sort of confirms some of the industry’s previous studies that state mornings between 6-10am are the best time to see the best Open Rates; and two, that in order to capture that audience, we need to either send the BV Buzz newsletter early enough to successfully target that timezone, or segment the mailing list by geography.

Although this was just a simple observation, I wanted to highlight the thought process that can help businesses really use their website analytics to get their message in front of their customers. Email is not dead and still a valuable tool in marketing.