Sending an email broadcast isn’t as simple as hitting the send button when you receive approval on the design and copy. Thought needs to go in so that you gain maximum opens and click-through rates (CTR).

An email campaign’s success depends on the engagement of your subscribers. This raises four questions. What day do you get most engagement from your subscribers? What time do your subscribers normally look through their inboxes? What time are they most likely to open an email and click? Do your subscribers read emails that have been sent over 12 hours ago?

Using data published from the first quarter of 2012, we have collated some interesting points about how broadcast times affect the success of an email.

Deciding the best day to send emails

Results show the majority of inbox traffic and activities occur on working days – with a peak on Thursday, which tops the charts for all metrics: percent sent, open rates and CTR.

Weekday versus weekend?

There is a small decrease in the number of outbound emails sent over the weekend, but the stats are still over 10%, showing that marketers do take advantage of lower traffic volumes on weekends. However, open rates and CTR show that subscribers are most active during weekdays, leaving weekends open for other activities.

Your subscribers’ daily routines

Knowing your subscribers’ daily routines can help you estimate the best day to send broadcasts. Knowing their weekly and monthly habits can also be advantageous.

Monday’s result: The lowest weekday (still higher than weekends). This may indicate that subscribers are still getting up to speed after the weekend.

Thursday’s result: The peak in open rates and CTR. This shows that this is when people browse their inbox with more engagement. 

A slight fall-off on Friday may be because the weekend is right around the corner.

These generic rules apply to most, but a more customised approach is sometimes required. If payday is on a Monday, the results may surge. If you’re in the entertainment industry, people start planning their weekends on Friday and will snap up your weekend offers. Your industry and organisation type has unique characteristics that mean you should always test, analyse and compare your campaign results.

When is the best time of day to send emails?

So you’ve decided on the best day to send your email broadcast, but there will also be an optimal time to send as well.

Open rates by time after broadcast

• 23.5% of all email opens happen within the first hour.
• Within the second hour, the results drop by half.
• The third hour sees results drop by another 30%.
• After five hours, the results drop more than 90%.

This means, in theory, if you send an email at 5pm, it has a 23.5% chance of being opened in the first hour of delivery, but in practice this isn’t true:

• At 5pm, people are stuck in traffic.
• At 6pm, they are eating dinner.
• At 7pm, they are dealing with children and bedtimes.
• Only by 8pm are they checking emails again.

Your email is now up to four hours old and has less than a 5% chance of being opened.

Rates by time of day

Most emails land in inboxes in the morning. That’s why emails sent in the afternoon have more chance of being noticed, opened and clicked.

Engagement during the day

The best time to send emails is when recipients are reviewing their inboxes.

The main peaks are:

Remember, don’t let your email lose impact by waiting too long in the inbox. Schedule emails to land in the inbox no later than one hour before top open times, so they get maximum attention and results.

Message timing by time zones

9am may be the ideal time to send out an email for recipients in your country, but if you are sending internationally, it could be completely the wrong time elsewhere. For example, 9am GMT is:

Consider segmenting your subscriber lists by location if you have the data available. We have a system in place that stores the location of a recipient when they open an email, meaning over time we naturally build up a map of where our recipients are located.

Summary

• Generally, Thursday is the best day to broadcast emails.
• Emails reach the best results within one hour of broadcast.
• If your recipients are occupied by other tasks, they won’t engage quick enough, meaning your email will be crowded by more recent messages.
• To optimise engagement rates of your email, you should schedule it to broadcast no later than one hour before the top open times, when the chances of getting noticed are highest.
• If you are broadcasting internationally, ensure that you segment your data to optimise delivery times over different time zones.

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The keynote at any major Apple event is always a massive talking point, and rumour mills start churning weeks before about potential unveilings. This year was no exception, with suggestions of TVs, updates to the all Mac lines, iPhone 5 and multiple software updates.

Apple CEO Tim Cook kicked off the near 2-hour presentation with the usual array of breathtaking numbers highlighting how well the company’s products are performing. The first figure was that this, the 23rd Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), sold out completely in 1 hour 43 minutes, with attendees from 60 countries!

App Store

The App Store has passed many milestones, including:

• 400 million accounts with stored credit cards - the largest collection on the web.
• 650,000 apps, 225,000 of which are optimised or made specifically for iPad.
• 30 billion cumulative app downloads.
• A total of $5 billion paid to developers.

Notebook Range

Updates to the notebook range mean they can now achieve even more things, even faster. Updates to the MacBook Air & Pro line-ups in particular include: 

• 3rd-generation cores (Ivy Bridge).
• Up to 8GB RAM.
• Up to 512GB SSD storage.
• 60% faster graphics (15” MacBook Pro model upgraded to 1GB video memory).
• USB 3.0 I/O interfaces for connecting external devices.

As well as the above, a new feature was unveiled, which Apple fans had long forecast. The retina display on the iPhone 4 and the ‘New iPad’ is set to completely change how people view graphics on-screen. 

The Next Generation MacBook Pro had to realise several advancements before it could be seen as a worthy replacement. These included a new display, new architecture for the future, being thinner and lighter, and embracing new technologies. Some key stats include: 

• 0.71 inches thin and under 4.5lbs.
• 15.4” 2880 x 1800 retina display (4x the number of current notebooks).
• Quad-core i7 CPUs.
• Up to 16GB RAM.
• Up to 768GB SSD storage.

OS X

In the 5 years that OS X has been with us, it has grown to be used by 66 million people. With each major release, Apple attempts to make consumers’ lives easier, integrating the computer with other devices such as iPhone and iPad.

This year sees Apple’s latest and greatest operating system release: Mountain Lion. It contains over 200 new features including updates to iCloud, iMessage, Notification Center (from iOS), Dictation, iCloud Tabs and many more.

iOS

As of March 2012, a staggering 365 million iOS devices have been sold and 80% of customers are running the latest iOS 5 software. Some quick facts about iOS 5 are: 

• 7 billion push notifications sent every day.
• 1.5 trillion push notifications already sent.
• 140 million iMessage users.
• 150 billion iMessages sent – that’s 1 billion per day!
• 130 million Game Center accounts.
• 5 billion scores posted every week.

The main part of the iOS talk during WWDC involved the introduction of iOS 6. Major improvements include new features for:

Siri:

• Sporting updates.
• Restaurant information partnered with Yelp for reviews.
• Movie times, trailers and information.
• Launching apps.
• Facebook integration.

Other updates:

• Phone app additions.
• FaceTime now functions through cellular networks.

The other big update is to Maps. Apple has decided to break its ties with both Google and iOS 6 and, instead, use its own cartography. Coupled with this is the launch of turn-by-turn navigation, which means Apple is now in direct competition with companies like TomTom and Navigon.

As you can see, there were major updates across pretty much all areas of Apple’s product range. Developers will now spend the rest of the week learning how to use the new hardware and software, to bring us new applications that make our lives easier and to produce more amazing work.

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It’s that time of year again, companies give their comedic employees free rein to launch revolutionary, innovative and forward-thinking ideas with one goal, show how dense the public really are… 

This year Google have gone all out to make sure they blow away the competition, so far we’ve spotted 9! Others to take part in the fun include Virgin, Subaru, moo.com and firebox.com. 

Here are the ones we enjoyed the most. 

From Google:

1. Relive your NES days and start a quest with 8-bit Google maps
2. Double your typing speed with this revolutionary new keyboard, Google Tap
3. If your search results just aren’t what you are looking for use the Really Advanced Search
4. The Chrome team have realised we are wasting 50% of our hands when browsing, but don’t worry, they’ve got it covered with Multitask Mode
5. Are you tired of your emails and messages being clogged with Jargon, well now it can be translated for you! Introducing Jargonbot
6. NASCAR is about to get the biggest shake up since fuel injection. Watch a demo of the new technology here and get ready to start your engines!
7. They’ve changed how we use the internet and now they want to look after our health with Google Fiber
8. Click through rate is so 2011! Start using Click-to-teleport today.
9. Now you can have YouTube with you even when you are offline! The YouTube Collection

From Virgin

1. Sir Richard Branson to Launch Journeys to the Centre of the Earth Through Virgin Volcanic
2. Virgin Holidays unveil the 'Branson', the newest currency to use while on holiday

From moo.com

Satisfied that the quality of the printed products is superb, moo.com have now set their sights on creating the ultimate packaging for your business cards. The lightbox.

From Firebox

A range of products from firebox.com for people who will buy just about anything!

• 1:2 scale replica Titanic
• Giant Gummi Bear
• Personalised fireworks
• Footbooteo
• Dubstep ladder

From England and Wales Cricket Board

To lower the risk of injury the ECB are introducing ball fetchers in the form of Bulldogs.

From Subaru

Reclaim those weekend hours and let your car clean itself!

From Sainsburys

Sainsburys are attempting to combat banana related injuries by being the world first supermarket to sell ‘non-slip’ bananas.

From The North of England

More cuts in UK spending come in the form of a merger between Yorkshire and Lancashire. Will you visit Larkshire?

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Occasionally, as a client, it can be a little confusing when a new website opens in your browser that doesn't look like the signed-off design - whether it's drop shadows not appearing where expected, round corners missing, or translucent areas being solid colour.

Web design is still seen as an extension of print and, as such, is still looked at in a very permanent, static way. It’s important to remember that visitors can access your website using a variety of different browsers (from Internet Explorer to Google Chrome) and devices (from laptops to mobile phones). Every single device and browser will render elements of a website in slightly different ways. By accepting these differences, you’ll actually start to reap the benefits:

Time spent on improvements

Creating rounded corners, gradients, drop shadows or animations is simple in modern browsers - but you’ll have a developer begging for mercy when trying to replicate it in older browsers, such as IE7 or 8.

Ask yourself this: would time be better spent making these elements look identical in older browsers (when the percentage of people seeing it is always falling), or should it be spent improving the user experience, carrying out user testing or adding some extra aesthetic touches?

Target a growing user base

As browsers are improved, the number of visitors using older browsers is shrinking every day. Why would you want to spend money on this area when you can create a website that will improve as the next generation of browsers are released?

Speed matters

By including functionality to allow all browsers to render a website identically, bloated code is created, alongside the need to load additional imagery that isn’t necessary for modern browsers. Broadband users now expect websites to load instantaneously, so there is no excuse for a slow-loading website.

Search results

The speed of a website could not only affect your conversion rate by users dropping out - it could also affect your search rankings. Google uses page size and loading time in its search algorithms. A fast-loading page will rank better than an identical page loading in double the time. Images and bloated code all contribute to the download time of a page. 

Built to last

Building a page using old techniques to cater for a small percentage of users will inherently mean that a website has a shorter lifespan than one built using the new tools available to developers. As browsers develop, you may find that including code to cater for older browsers limits your website’s potential.

Quicker updates

What seems like a simple job could potentially take many extra hours if a website is built to operate fully in older browsers. Colour changes can involve recreating images rather than a simple CSS modification, for example. This extra time eats into a project’s budget and means less work can be completed.

Pushing the boundaries

The web is all about pushing technology to the edge, and designers love to challenge boundaries. The sure-fire way to de-motivate a designer is to hold them back and insist their ideas work in outdated browsers. Would you rather have a website that sings as loudly as it can, or one that simply fades into the background?

But visitors will notice!

You will actually find your more accomplished users already using modern browsers, and those who aren't won't miss the round corners or drop shadows because they won't know to look for them.

This has always been a difficult point to explain but a comment I heard by Andy Clarke summed it up perfectly. It's a very well kept secret, but... 

Only geeks have more than one browser installed!

Your average user will have one browser and would never think to compare a website in Chrome and IE7. So, by accepting this, and acknowledging that there will always be differences between browsers, we can design and build websites to their greatest potential.

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Yesterday I posted about DIBI, a web conference I attended recently. One speaker, Gareth Rushgrove, spoke about how a modern web developer has many tools available to them to do their job. The title "web developer" should actually be replaced with just "developer" as we now have to deal with much more than just the web.

So what tools are there that could make your web apps run faster and more reliably? Just a few mentioned during the talk were: -

1. Nginx - nginx.org

   A very lightweight, FAST web server. An interesting quote mentioned during the talk was by Chris Lea,

    

   “Apache is like Microsoft Word, it has a million options but you only need six. Nginx does those six things, and does five of them 50 times faster than Apache”.

    

2. Memcached - memcached.org

   A high performance distributed caching system intended to increase speed of dynamic web apps by relieving database load. It is also useful in that it scales as your server resource grows.

3. Apache Solr - lucene.apache.org/solr

   How many of us are guilty of building a website, then dropping on a search box right at the end and not spending any time thinking about how we are actually going to obtain the results. Running direct database queries is not only slow, but very expensive! Plus, as your site grows, the search will come back and bite you and eventually, take your server(s) down.

   Enter Solr, a fast, open source search platform from the Apache Lucerne project. Features include full-text search; hit highlighting and even handles rich document formats like Word and PDF.

   Written in Java, it runs as a standalone full-text search server on something like Tomcat. It has REST HTTP/XML and JSON APIs that means it can be accessed from more or less any programming langauge without any need for Java coding.

4. RabbitMQ - rabbitmq.com

   Traditionally the web has always done everything synchronously. A request is sent to a server, data is processed and finally the result is sent back. This is fine if the request is minor, but what if the server elected to process the request takes 15 seconds? Is the user expected to wait, or can they go on and send further requests? By queueing messages it takes load off servers, which can just pop a message off the queue when it has spare capacity, and also means users aren’t sat waiting for a result to be returned.

5. Data storage with CouchDB - couchdb.apache.org

   Sometimes a full relational database is overkill when you just want to store a large amount of data. CouchDB is schema-free meaning that as your data evolves, it will evolve with you. Normally with relational databases like MySQL you would have to migrate existing data to fit into a new schema. With couchDB this isn’t the case, as no schema is enforced, new data can be safely added alongside the old.

6. Hadoop - hadoop.apache.org

   Hadoop is useful tool for distributing tasks across many nodes in completely different geographical locations. Whatever you would use hadoop for, you would need Hadoop common, plus one or more of its subprojects such as HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System); HBase a scalable distributed database for storing large tables of data or MapReduce, a framework for distributing processing of large data sets across multiple nodes.

7. Cucumber - cukes.info

   A Behaviour Driven Development tool, Cucumber allows ‘tests’ to be written in the form of plain text feature descriptions with scenarios. These scenarios can then signed off by project stakeholders, business analyists and collegues. Production code can then be written to make the ‘stories’ pass. Cucumber is written in Ruby, but can be used to test many other languages such as Java, C#, Python and PHP.

8. Puppet - puppetlabs.com

   More and more developers these days need to also be some kind of sysadmin. Whether its being a full on linux geek or not, setting up a server for production use is now a required skill. This is where Puppet comes into play. No matter how many times you do it, installing and configuring a server is a pain. By using puppet, you can declare multiple setups depending you what you will be using the node for. Do you need a bare bones install with SSH running? What about extending this node declaration and adding on Nginx? With puppet this is as simple as extending a class in PHP!

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Held at The Sage in Gateshead, DIBI is one very few, if not the first, to bring designers & developers under one roof for a day and allow them to listen to some of the industries leading names talk about their experiences and passions.

What made the event great was that both design & development 'tracks' ran side by side, so you could jump between halls depending on what topics you were interested in without worrying about what your 'official' job title was. So if you were developer that wanted to hear about iPhone UI design, or a designer that had an underlying passion to bring their designs to life with a bit jQuery magic, it didn't matter.

Here's a run down of my particular day and a brief idea of what I heard!

Jon McLoone

Using Wolfram|Alpha to build computational applications

To start the day, both tracks got a brief insight into what Wolfram|Atlpha is; what its purpose is; why it isn't, and never will be a 'Google killer' and the small question of how Wolfram Research can make money from it. A few examples of data that can be extracted from Wolfram|Alpha impressed the audience, and Jon answered any questions about the application comprehensively.

Elliott Kember @elliottkember

Pimp your app with jQuery

The Kiwi with a unhealthy obsession for the colour pink kicked off the developer track with a great whirlwind talk around the incredibly powerful tool, jQuery. In 30 minutes Elliot managed to cram in several ideas on how you can implement jQuery to really put some zing into your web apps. Simple tasks like show and hide, to animating elements in or out of focus, to posting Forms with AjaxForm. A difficult topic to explain even if the majority of the audience were already users of the framework and Elliot managed to do this clearly, showing a few tricks along the way to save time when battering the keyboard.

David Singleton @dsingleton

Last.fm vs Xbox

So you have a kickass start-up like last.fm and Microsoft goes and creates an app to hook into your system from millions of living rooms across the globe through their Xbox. Great right? Hell yeah, just the slight issue of how the hell do you cope with the increase in traffic, especially the launch day spike?

David explained the process last.fm took to estimate what traffic they may receive, and after the ‘Oh Sh*t’ moment, how they would deal with this increase. From profiling their API with tools like Kcachegrind; politely asking Microsoft to rework their app so it didn’t send 3 requests just to make the ‘love’ button glow, to heavy caching at several stages of the application stack. David gave some great information and showed that even successful web apps have their problems, such as server fires, or security issues at data centres…..

Gareth Rushgrove @garethr

You're going to need a bigger toolbox

Currently a developer a Glasses Direct, Gareth gave a a brief talk about the many tools a developer has to work with in 2010. In years gone by, it was simply a case of knowing PHP, mySQL and Apache. With those three tools you could pretty much do anything! This still applies, but you now have many alternatives, plus the many, many tools available to make everything faster and more reliable which can only mean one thing, the end user is happier because websites are fast, always online and aren’t waiting for things to happen.

Websites that are known and used by most frequent web users actually have many tools to make up their stack. A few examples are: -

• LastFM
  • PHP
  • C++
  • Java
  • Hadoop
  • Python
• Twitter
  • Ruby
  • Scala
  • Java
  • C++
• Facebook
  • PHP
  • Erlang
  • C
  • MySQL
  • Cassandra

The point here is, you need to know when you stack isn’t up to the job. Are you using the current toolkit because it’s what you know, rather than using a tool that could do a better job?

Gareth showed that many of the tools that some shy away from because they are ‘complicated’, can be implemented relatively simply and costing nothing but time. There was a strong warning in the conclusion of the talk…don’t go bounding in and install all these tools on your production server without testing and learning them first. If you do, something WILL go wrong and your knowledge won’t be large enough to dig you out.

Read more about some of tools Gareth mentioned during his talk here.

Peter-Paul Koch (PPK) @ppk

The touch action

PPK started his 30 minute slot telling us how a few years ago he was bored of the work he was doing. Day in, day out testing in browsers on computers. Luckily he was released from this boredom when he was offered a job at Vodafone testing mobile browsers. He now has many more browsers to play with, through several interfaces such as the mouse, keyboard, trackball and touch. Peter showed how depending on the mobile device being used, different events were fired. For example, how do you fire the hover event with a touch interface such as on the iPhone? How do you replicate the swipe gesture on the iPhone using a mouse or keyboard?

Dan Rubin @danrubin

Blending Usability testing with interface design, prototyping and rapid interaction

Called in at the last minute, Dan gave a polished talk on how he and a team of usability testers took a website that looked AWFUL, but amazingly already had a large turnover, applied a few tried and tested techniques and rules and proved to the client through two sessions with users, that the interface can make or break a conversion.

If you are a designer and told you can’t change the look of the website as it already works to create a turnover of $5 million per year, it must be difficult to make vast improvements. But by applying rules such as a grid layout, and organising the pages with some thought, users found it much easier to complete an order. Even small alterations requested by the client, made during a testing session, made the checkout system completely unusable to customers. This type of testing helps prove many core rules that need to be adhered to in order to make a website ‘useable’.

Andy Clarke @malarkey

Harboiled Web design

Known by many to have strong opinions about what should be done during the design process, Andy gave a great talk giving listeners a brief idea of what his new book ‘Hardboiled web design’ is about.

Using CSS3 and HTML5 shouldn’t be shyed away from, and it isn’t bad to use vender prefix CSS rules to help enhance your websites look. Adding small animations, 3D transformations, or even small effects like text shadows and border radiuses shouldn’t be overlooked just because CSS3 isn’t ‘a standard’.

Browser testing should no longer be a process of getting a ruler on a screen and checking everything lines up exactly the same in each browser, but rather using the tools available in any particular browser to make the experience as good as possible. Why should people using Safari 4 be held back by users stuck in 2001 with IE6! Instead use a tool like Modernizr and detect what you can and can’t do to enhance the website for this visitor. Browser testing in 2010 should be more about checking that a visitor can get the best experience that their browser allows them to. So if the visitor is viewing with Safari 4, add some animation and transitions, and it not, don’t.

A great quote that sums up everything he believes in is “Only geeks have more than one browser installed! Your mum won’t be checking that a webpage looks the same in Safari and IE”.

For its first year, DIBI was a great success, and also being my first visit to the North East, I can also say that was pretty good too! For anyone wanting to go see speakers talk about a whole variety of topics to do with the web, I highly recommend next years DIBI, which is again at The Sage in Gateshead, on 8th June. See the website for more details.

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I have finally got round to splitting out my 2 main domains into separate websites/blogs/dumping grounds.

I plan to use my this site, http://www.joeturner.info for anything to do with the digital sector, and less for my personal rants and raves. Those will happen over at http://www.mentalreality.co.uk. So, want to read interesting geeky things, stick around here. Want to see what I'm thinking about world on the whole, head over to MentalReality

I'm sure iI'll keep up this idea for at least, oh I don't know, a month?

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