NextAfter

How send time affects email open rate

Experiment ID: #11724

NextAfter

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 05/17/2016 - 05/24/2016

NextAfter was promoting their Nonprofit Innovation and Optimization Summit, a conference for nonprofit marketers. They were sending an in-depth story telling how the conference came together, and wanted to see what time of day got the best open rate. Were the members of their list earlybird or night owls?

Research Question

What time of day gets the most email opens?

Results

  Treatment Name Open Rate Relative Difference Confidence
C: Early Send 23.3%
T1: Late Send 30.3% 30.2% 100.0%

This experiment has a required sample size of 306 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 4,851, and the level of confidence is above 95% the experiment results are valid.

Flux Metrics Affected

The Flux Metrics analyze the three primary metrics that affect revenue (traffic, conversion rate, and average gift). This experiment produced the following results:

    30.2% increase in traffic
× 0% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

We found that our readers, at least in this one case, are night owls. This may indicate that they have less time during the day to read emails, and are more likely to consume this content at night. Even though the test was statistically valid, it warrants more testing.


Experiment Documented by Kevin Peters

Question about experiment #11724

If you have any questions about this experiment or would like additional details not discussed above, please feel free to contact them directly.