As most of you already know, I love MarketingSherpa.  In case you're unfamiliar, MarketingSherpa is a research firm that publishes case studies (my favorite), real life examples of marketing successes, and data collected from surveys and tests.  One of the other things I really like about MarketingSherpa is their willingness to publish a lot of their own numbers.

This morning I ran across a blog post from Sherpa President Anne Holland that not only made a valid marketing point, but also used internal MarketingSherpa numbers to back up that point.

The topic of the blog post was email marketing and relevancy.  To illustrate her point that timing is critical for relevancy, Holland published some statistics from an email campaign her company used to drive traffic to a teleseminar they did in December (which was great, by the way).  Everyone on their email list was sent the same three emails which only varied in timing and subject line.

MarketingSherpa discovered that the email sent one hour before the teleseminar, with a subject that read "Just 1 Hour Until the Email Marketing Teleseminar" was opened the most.  In fact, that email was opened more than twice as often as a similar email sent the day before.  In addition, the thank you email that was sent to everyone the next day was opened nearly as often as the one reminding people that they only had an hour to tune in.

So as the numbers there show, the timing of an email can make all the difference in the world when it comes to opening… and consequently conversion rates.  Holland suggests more B-to-B marketing departments give timed email marketing a try.  Her company is currently in the process of collecting data on the subject and says it should be ready in time for the Email Summit that MarketingSherpa hosts every year.  But as she also points out, it's important to talk the matter over with your email supplier to make sure there won't be any hiccups (some email systems are not configured to handle timed marketing effectively).

Finally, in another post, MarketingSherpa talks about a new book called "Word of Mouth Marketing:  How Smart Companies Get People Talking" by Andy Sernovitz.  Sernovitz, the CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, offers an entertaining and educational look at word of mouth marketing techniques and practices.  MarketingSherpa is giving 5 copies of the book away, so make sure you read the review and enter to win the book before the January 28th deadline!