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Tips for improving your opt-in newsletter broadcasts

Finding the best times and best formats for your opt-in newsletter broadcasts

Ever wonder what the best day of the week is to send your opt-in newsletter? What are the best ways to ensure that your newsletter gets past your opt-in customers' spam filters? The best ways to get them to open it?

I'd like to thank Tom Kulzer of AWeber autoresponder system for making a good deal of that info available. Tom says that most people look at aWeber as being strictly an autoresponder system and don't realize how effective they are at making sure that opt-in newsletters get through and get read. So with thanks to Tom, here are the stats he provided. I'm sure you'll find lots of useful tips for your own newsletters. All data is based on AWeber's experience.

Real World Newsletter Statistics:

12,561 subscribers in an average customer opt-in newsletter list.

Speed of newsletter broadcast

4 minutes and 24 seconds is the average amount of time between when a customer queues a newsletter and when AWeber completes delivery.

94% of newsletter broadcasts are finished sending within 5 minutes of when they are scheduled.

98.4% of newsletter broadcasts are finished sending within 30 minutes of when they are scheduled.

Deliverability

99.34% of all email was delivered successfully in the last 30 days.

0.66% of all email was undeliverable in the last 30 days. (mailbox
closed, non-existent user, etc.)

Open rates

Average open rate of HTML and Text/HTML newsletters is 29.7% over the past 30 days.

Sunday generates the highest average open rate of 41.1%, followed by Saturday at 36.7% for newsletter sent date.

Average Open Rate by Sent Date: (higher is better)

1. Sunday 41.1%
2. Saturday 36.7%
3. Wednesday 34.0%
4. Friday 32.8%
5. Tuesday 29.6%
6. Thursday 24.6%
7. Monday 23.2%

Undeliverable newsletters

Sunday generates the fewest undeliverable bounces at 0.36% for newsletters sent on that date.

Average Undeliverable Rate by Sent Date: (lower is better)

1. Sunday 0.36%
2. Saturday 0.45%
3. Friday 0.47%
4. Thursday 0.56%
5. Wednesday 0.77%
6. Tuesday 0.83%
7. Monday 0.88%

Popular days to send

Monday is the most popular day of the week for customers to send their newsletters with 17.1% of newsletters being sent.

Percent of newsletters being sent by customers weekly:

1. Monday 17.1%
2. Tuesday 17.0%
3. Thursday 16.2%
4. Wednesday 15.8%
5. Friday 14.5%
6. Saturday 10.3%
7. Sunday 9.0%

Best time to send

An 8:00 AM EST send time generates the highest open rate of 50.6%. Interestingly sending at 9:00 AM EST has a significantly lower open rate of 33.7% with the worst time to send being 3-4 AM at only 19% open rate.

Formats

Plain text messages are the most popular format of sending newsletters with 65.9% of all newsletters sent. Mime format Text/HTML messages follow at 23.8% and a remaining 10.2% of customers still send HTML only messages even though it is strongly recommended to always include a plain text version.

Plain text messages generate the fewest undeliverable bounces at 0.46%. Mime format Text/HTML follows at 0.56% and HTML only messages have a whopping 1.09% undeliverable rate. This is a significant reason behind our recommendation to always send a plain text alternative with HTML formatted messages.

Subject lines

Subject line personalization using the date generated an average open rate of 51.4% compared to personalization using the subscriber's first name generating 40.9% open rate. Newsletters sent without personalization of any type in the subject line generated average open rates of 28.9%.

17% of customer newsletter subject lines sent in the last 30 days contained date personalization while 19% used the subscriber's first name. 56.3% of subject lines did not contain any type of personalization. Interestingly, using the subscriber's full name or last name generated lower average open rates at 20%.

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