What is the best day and time for promotions?

Knowing what is the best time of the day, month or year to run promotions is challenging because it depends on many factors, such as our target, the objectives of the campaign or the type of product being promoted.

However, there are some useful guidelines you can follow:

1. Identifies the behavioral patterns of your customers: to determine the best time to run promotions, you should consider when your customers are most active, when they are most likely to spend money, and when they are most likely to be available to visit your website.
2. Analyze your sales historyReview the sales history of your products and look at buying patterns to see what time of day, week, month or year was most successful.
3. TestExperiment with different days and times to send your promotions and evaluate the results. Analyze the metrics of each promotion and use the results to fine-tune your strategy.

Connectif is a marketing automation tool that will help to send promotions at the right time, according to the needs of the company and its customers. And with the use of Data First it will be much easier!

What should be taken into account when analyzing behavior?

Whenever special dates like Valentine's Day, Christmas or Black Friday come around, we always ask ourselves what may be the best day to stand out We are also able to stay ahead of others in terms of launching our campaigns and making sure that the information we are sending out gets to its intended recipient and gets results.

But we should not only ask ourselves when those special days arrive, it is also interesting to know for any flash offers, for example, or any informative email we want to send.

Connectif will help us in the process of launching the promotion, allowing us to send personalized messages, generate reports in real time or automate follow-up processes.

Therefore, the first thing we have to do is to analyze what kind of campaign we want do and what factors we have to take into account:

• Target of the promotion: clearly define what you want to achieve (increase sales, build customer loyalty, attract new customers...).
• DurationSelect a period of time long enough for customers to become aware of the promotion, but not too long for them to forget about it.
• What are you going to offer: a percentage discount, a special price, a gift with purchase? Make sure that the offer is attractive for your customers and that can be financed economically.
• Audience segmentationWhich target audience you want to attract. Use the information you have available about your customers to segment them according to their interests, behaviors and needs.
• Message and design of the promotionCreate a clear, compelling and engaging message to communicate the offer. Also, make sure the design is in alignment with the brand.
• Decide in which communication channels the promotion will be disseminated by e-mail, social networks, inlines, SMS, etc.
• Analysis and follow-up: at the end of the promotion, analyze the results and measure the success of the promotion through metrics such as return on investment (ROI), conversion rate and other indicators that are relevant to your objectives.
• Finally, make sure you continue to offer a good attention to your customers when the promotion is over to create loyalty.

The basis from which we start is that the best time (according to our lifestyle and work schedules) is between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. and between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m.. Both time slots coincide with lunch and dinner hours, when people usually have more free time to pick up their cell phones or computers and check their email or social networks; and the chances that they will see our promotions are much higher.

But, as we have already said, this is a base.

According to this WARC studyIn Europe, the best day to launch campaigns and where the best results are obtained are Wednesdays and Sundays. However, the reality is that nothing will assure us 100% what is generally the best time or day to do promotions, but we can get close. We must understand the context and environment to which our audience may belong.

It is true that some days or time slots are better than others, and each store, each website has a different target and work in different ways, so the best thing to do would be to analyze what statistics we have in our account thanks to the behavior of contacts and the Data Explorer.

Tuning with Data Explorer

The Data First approach gives us the opportunity to intelligently use the data we have so far from a contact or customer. Thanks to this data, we will be able to generate a more effective impact by personalizing mailings and using the communication channel preferred by our customers in relation to our eCommerce. In this way, we will maximize our ability to influence and obtain better results.

For this we will use the Data ExplorerThis will allow us to segment and see what is the most important
which works best according to data collected by Connectif.

The first piece of information we need to know is the number of visits to our websitecollecting data from the last year to gather more information. Here we see that in this eCommerce, the day that receives more visits are Mondays and Tuesdays. It is curious to note that the days with the highest number of purchases coincide with the days with the highest number of visits.

With this data we can already get an idea of when it would be best to launch promotions, but we cannot be satisfied with this alone.

We are also interested in knowing the days on which the different communication channels work best. Here we have chosen emails, web content and push notifications:

We can see that here things change a bit. As for the email channel, the conversion rate is higher on weekends, but the conversion rate for web content does coincide with the filtering of the general number of purchases that we had done previously. This will help us to know how to manage promotions across channels according to the day of the week.

To understand a little bit more about why the If the email channel is more effective on different days, we have added to the report the metrics of Number of sends and Number of unsubscribes. We see that both metrics are higher on Mondays, i.e., on Mondays there are more sends in general, and therefore, there are more unsubscribes in general.

On weekends there are fewer shipments, so there are fewer casualties. In this case, one strategy could be to increase shipments on weekends and less on weekends. MondayWe will be able to see if this data would change or if we should keep testing to find the perfect day for our eCommerce.

To find out what time a particular campaign works best for us or to know what time we get the most visits or when people open the most emails or click the most, we can take a quick look at Connectif's Dashboard section.

Below we can see that Mondays are the days with the highest number of shipments, and that the opening hours were 9:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m:

Practical example: How to hit the nail on the head to send a Flash Offer?

A flash offer is always something that works very well, especially because it is something ephemeral and "take it or leave it". When a customer hesitates and comes across such an offer, they need to make a decision, and we want that decision to be beneficial to our business.

For this, we are going to implement the factors to be taken into account as explained above:

• Our objective? We want to get more purchases.
• Duration of the offer? As it is a flash offer, we want it to last 2 days, and thus create a sense of urgency for the customer to make a decision quickly and not to think about it too carefully.
• What offer? We will give an attractive discount, a 30% discount on a specific category in our store.
• Audience segmentationThis offer will only be for those who have shown interest in the category in which we offer the discount.
• Message and designThe design should follow the line of our store, but here the important thing is that it is clear what we offer and for how long. It is even a good idea to put a countdown.
• Channels: email. We can complement this with a pop-up that appears when the customer has visited the third product of the same category.

If we are not very clear at first and after analyzing our purchase history which day or time we can launch our flash offer, we can make a test a/b/x and thus collect data and when finished see what worked best and fine tune for future communications.

With Connectif we will be able to fine-tune the best time to send promotions to our customers thanks to the Data Explorer, based on the behavior of each contact, the number of visits to the website each day, the opening rate, the click-through rate...

We do not want to close this post without making a few recommendations and essential tips:

And if you want to make a leap in your business, in Geotelecom we can advise and promote you through our Marketing Automation service.

Contact us now and we will tell you how we work.