One Saturday lunchtime two weeks ago I logged onto one of our servers to send the email invites for two customer surveys that we field regularly. Some time ago the Messaging Times posed the question whether sending emails at the weekend is more effective than during the week – which got us thinking.
We have looked at the best time to email (survey invites) in the past and generally concluded that the day of the week doesn’t really make a big difference. Other factors have a much bigger influence – e.g. amount of time passed since the last customer contact.
Our conclusion for the 2 surveys we trialled is sending the email invites on a Saturday definitely doesn’t harm the response rate. When we email a survey we typically see click-thru’s start coming in after only a couple of minutes (assuming at least a few hundred emails being sent) but I was still surprised to see the same effect on a Saturday. The response rate at the end of the first day was 2.5% lower for Saturday than for those surveys emailed on the Monday, but the Saturday mailings also saw a small boost on the Monday – presumably recipients who aren’t checking their mail at the weekend catching up on their inbox.
| “Normal” Mailed on Monday |
“Test” Mailed on Saturday |
|
|---|---|---|
| End of Day 1 | 16.60% | 14.00% |
| Day 2 | 23.70% | 21.30% |
| Day 3 | 26.00% | 26.40% |
| Day 4 | 27.00% | 27.00% |
| Day 5 | 27.60% | 27.80% |
| Day 6 | 28.20% | 28.40% |
| Day 7 | 28.40% | 28.70% |
Table 1: First survey’s click-thru rates (cumulative %) after 7 days
Whenever possible we send a reminder/follow-up email to the non-responders – so Saturdays adds some flexibility to our resources schedule if it were required (assuming that the survey doesn’t need results within less than 4 or 5 days). * Your circumstances and experience might be different.
| “Normal” Mailed on Monday |
“Test” Mailed on Saturday |
|
|---|---|---|
| End of Day 1 | 20.20% | 17.20% |
| Day 2 | 26.30% | 25.20% |
| Day 3 | 28.70% | 30.00% |
| Day 4 | 30.00% | 31.50% |
| Day 5 | 30.70% | 31.90% |
| Day 6 | 31.40% | 32.40% |
| Day 7 | 31.70% | 32.50% |
Table 2: Second survey’s click-thru rates (cumulative %) after 7 days
Dan Wardle
3 responses so far ↓
foibles // 5, December 2009 at 12:24 am
that’s really good to know about weekend response rates. re:response rates–check these findings in a Zoomerang research article analyzing so-called ‘bad respondents’ in online surveys and how they impact business decisions
http://snurl.com/truesample
Dan // 5, December 2009 at 3:52 pm
Foibles – thanks for the response, although your link didn’t work – let me know what it should be and I’ll update the link. Will be interesting to read…
foibles // 5, December 2009 at 7:51 pm
Dan, sorry, mistyped the link.
try
http://snurl.com/truesample3