The key to success with email marketing is to provide messages to your users that are timely, relevant and practical. Over time, you’ll identify the best days of the week and times of day to email your users to maximize their readership and click-through rates.
Now, what if your users are getting emails from automated sequences? Normally, marketing software will let you determine the amount of time to delay the sending of the next email — but not necessarily which exact day of the week to send it. This can lead to your users getting emails on days and at times that are bad for conversions.
On top of that, if your reader receives an email from you at an awkward time of day, say midnight, it could get buried in new emails by the morning. That will reduce readership as well as clicks.
Or, what if your reader gets your email on a Thursday with a time-sensitive offer on Friday? That gives them very little time to consider and click-through to your offer — and gives you very little, if any time, to send follow-up emails before the offer expires.
That’s why it’s critical to set up your automated sequences to email your prospects only on the best days of the week, at the best times of day. And while not every marketing platform lets you do that, this is one of the standard benefits of Kartra.
Here’s how to implement it.
Kartra Sequence Scheduling
Kartra users can schedule their auto-responder sequences by day of the week and time of day.
We will use this short auto-responder sequence to demonstrate…
Let’s say you have a product and you want to promote an offer, discount or bonus as expiring on Friday. You’re making this same offer weekly; however, each week, new people are exposed to this offer so, from their standpoint, it is a new and one-time offer.
Since people can enter your sequence at any time (like a Wednesday or a Thursday), it may be difficult for them to take advantage of a time-sensitive Friday offer.
This feature in Kartra allows you to initiate the sequence on a particular day of the week – in this case, Monday. Anyone who enters this sequence will receive their first email of the sequence on the following Monday.
For example: say your customer enters the sequence on a Saturday. That customer will get their first email on the following Monday, two days later.
Now say your customer didn’t enter until a Tuesday. That customer would get their first email on the following Monday, six days later.
This will ensure that each customer goes through the entire sequence of emails, no matter which day of the week they enter the sequence. Each customer will always get the first email of your sequence on the following Monday (and at the time you specify, if you program a time-frame).
How To Use This Benefit
Go to the first email in your sequence. Hover over the three dots and click on “Edit”.
This window will appear:
See the second row titled “Day & Time”. Click on the pencil icon at the right side of that row. You will see the following window appear.
By default, all the days will be checked and the Allowed Time will be “At any time of the day”.
Uncheck every day except the day you want your email sequence to initiate; in this case, Monday.
Then schedule your allowed delivery time if you want – let’s set this one to between 7:00 am and 11:59 am. (Note: times are set to the Eastern time zone by default; please calculate your send times accordingly.)
Strategically Time Your Emails
Kartra gives you the flexibility to specify a specific time or a window for sending your email. Why would you want to set a time? (And remember – it can be any time of day that you prefer.) In this case, you might want to greet your reader, who is receiving this email between 7:00 am and 11:59 am with, “It’s a great Monday morning!” This reinforces to your subscriber that this email was, indeed, sent on a Monday morning.
Please note that you can set a time range OR a more precise time for your email to go out. The Kartra system will attempt to send at the precise time you specify but this can shift slightly based on server load. Specifying an acceptable time window ensures your email goes out when you expect.
You can also let them know that the bonus/offer/discount ends in just four days – on Friday – so they understand this is a limited-time event.
Next, you can add a second email – delayed by one day (so to go out on Tuesday, in this case) – to remind your subscriber that they have only three days left until the special bonus expires (Note the Day & Time below).
Then, three days later, you can send the Friday email to let them know that today is the day to take advantage of your offer (Note the Day & Time below).
Who Will Get Your Sequence
Anyone who entered the sequence prior to Monday at 7:00 am (Eastern) will receive the first triggered email and following emails in the sequence that week.
Anyone who enters the sequence after 7 am (Eastern) on Monday (in this case) will receive the Monday email at the next pre-configured day and time; in this case, the Monday morning of the next week.
Here is another example — you may want to create a sequence that only sends emails on the weekend. Simply use the Edit feature in the same way. In Date & Time, select Saturday and Sunday, choose a time window if you prefer, and you’re all set. Anyone who enters the sequence will receive those emails starting the next Saturday at the time(s) you’ve set.
YOU control the pacing.
This Kartra benefit gives you control of the pacing of your sequence because you can specify how quickly and frequently you communicate with your readers AND exactly when you want them to begin getting that information. You are not at the mercy of a general 1, 2 or 3 days later time-frame with your emails but, instead, you determine exactly what day of the week the sequence initiates as well as when each email in the sequence is sent.
So there you have it – one more way that Kartra helps you customer-tailor your marketing campaigns to your business needs.
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