Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Addendum: Groupon and Living Social Thoughts

What timing! As soon as I write my post on the thinking behind Groupon and LivingSocial's email timing strategy, a social media/email marketing guy from HubSpot shares his presentation on just what I was looking for.

Email open rates, unsubscribe rates, etc. based on time of day and day of the week.

Very interesting stuff. Although I do have some questions.

The chart in this presentation (which doesn't give a lot of context or explicit background, but it's free so I won't complain) which describes the clicks on emails by hour of the day.

It peaks around 6am, tapering off thereafter and remaining consistently low (with the lowest period between 2pm and 3pm).

I would be very interested to learn more about their data set, but this would suggest that you'll get twice the click-through by sending an email solicitation between 5am and 7am as you will if you send it between 2pm and 4pm.

This does make a fair bit of logical sense, if you assume that people get more and more sh*t to do over the course of the day and that to get their attention, you have to do it early.

However, the data also suggests that people are almost twice as likely to click through on weekends than on weekdays. That's interesting, and implies that most people aren't wasting their entire workday responding to junk email (or at least their wasting relatively more of their free time doing it).

If that's true, I wonder why the email marketing isn't more pronounced on weekends. I don't think I get more than one per day from both Groupon and LivingSocial on Saturdays and Sundays, but this data would imply that I'm twice as likely to open it then.

At any rate, it's late, I'm just thinking out loud, I should probably get some sleep. I'm sure I'll have some great solicitation emails pop in before I get up in the morning.

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