If there’s one thing every email marketer wants to know, it’s the answer to this question: When is the best time to send an email? By the time you finish this article, you’ll finally know the answer.

You see, it’s pretty obvious why this question gets asked so often. If we email marketers know when our audience is sitting at their computers, then there’s a better chance that they’ll see it. If they see it, they might open it, click on our links, take out their credit cards and buy our stuff.

And so email marketers try to find the “sweet” spot: That point when the recipient’s email inbox is fairly empty, so your email will be easy to spot. Maybe you want to find a time of the day when the recipient has a few minutes to spare. Perhaps you look for a day of the week when it’s likely our subscribers are sitting at their computers.

But for the most part, it’s guesswork. And just guessing the best time to send an email doesn’t put money in your bank accounts.

If you want to be certain about the best time to send an email, then you need to follow this simple two-step system…

Step #1: Find out when most of your readers are online.

Don’t guess! Instead, go to your traffic logs. Find out when your website is the busiest. And in particular, find out when most of the people on your list joined your list. If you can find a pattern where they joined on a particular day and approximate time range, then that is probably the best time to send an email.

TIP: If you have a global audience, then people who sign up for your list on their lunch break in London is a completely different time then those who are joining during lunch time in San Francisco. If you use a service like Aweber or Get Response, you can segment your list by region, which allows you to more easily send emails to a global audience.

Once you’ve determined when most of your audience is online, you can start sending emails out at that time. But don’t forget about Step #2…

Step #2: Track and test your results!

Just because your traffic logs and autoresponder statistics suggest that most people joined on their lunch break doesn’t mean noon is the best time to send an email. Instead, you may find that your list is most responsive late at night, after their home from work and the family is asleep. Or you may find that they’re most responsive to your offers first thing in the morning.

Point is, finding out when your audience is online serves as a starting point. But ultimately, you need to test your list to find out when they’re most responsive. That means creating identical emails, splitting your list, and sending your emails out at different times of the day (and even different days).

In short: Let your subscribers vote with their wallets. Tracking and testing is the only way to know for sure when your list is the most eager to respond to your offer.

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Greg Chadwick

I operate a large network of advertising sites and one of the most frustrating thing a marketer can face is getting their emails delivered, whether they are signup confirmation emails or your occasional mailings to stay in touch with your members.

As marketers we all know that a GMail account is the best as far as deliverability is concerned (or so we think). Have you ever checked your spam folder in your GMail account? You’d be surprised how much ends up in there. I have spent much time researching and testing how to get GMail to NOT put my emails into my members’ spam folders.

Here are the steps you need to take:

1) Make sure you have an SPF record for every domain that you send email from. SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework and it’s job is to tell the mail server on the other end that ip address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is permitted to send email for domain abc.com. All you need to do to set one up is go into your CPanel, and under Mail click on EMail Authentication. Then where it says SPF click the enable button. That’s it. Now if you send your email through a different server eg a remote server then it gets a little more complicated and I will address that in a future post. (Basically you need to go into WHM and edit the SPF record in the DNS zone and add the ip of the remote server you use to send mail for your domain.)

In order for Google to notice your SPF record send a few test emails from your domain to your own GMail account so Google knows about it.

2) In CPanel under Mail click on Forwarders. Setup two forwarders that forward to a real working email address as follows:

postmaster@yourdomain.com ==> you@yourdomain.com
abuse@yourdomain.com ==> you@yourdomain.com

Some mail servers check for the existence of these email accounts and check that they are able to receive email before they will deliver your email.

3) If you are using a PHP script to send your email then we have to correct another problem. Most PHP scripts by default send email as user nobody. So when GMail gets your email the Return Path looks like this:  someacount@server1.domain.com instead of your email address. The result? Gmail sends it straight to the spam folder every time.  You need to open up the PHP script that sends the email and look for this line:

mail($contactemail, $Subject, $Message,$headers);

and change it to:

mail($contactemail, $Subject, $Message,$headers,”-fadmin@yourdomain.com”);

(assuming you are sending email as admin@yourdomain.com)  and yes, the -f runs right into the email address.

WARNING:  Whenever editing a PHP file ALWAYS keep an unmodified backup copy at the ready in case something goes wrong with your edit. And always, always test your edited script to make sure it still works correctly.

GMail makes it pretty easy to troubleshoot email delivery problems. Find an email sent by your site in your own GMail account and open it. In the top right hand corner click the down arrow beside Reply. Then select Show Original. That will open a new window showing you the mail headers.  You can check if your SPF record is working because GMail will class it as Pass, Neutral, Soft Fail or Fail. You want it to say Pass. If it says Neutral then Google is not sure and makes a guess. You can also look at the Return Path. If you made the edit to your PHP script is should say admin@yourdomain.com NOT someaccount@server.domain.com

Following these 3 steps should get your emails delivered a lot more reliably especially to GMail. I hope that helps out a few people especially my fellow text ad exchange admins.

Greg Chadwick

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Okay, let’s start things off with a rant. You know those websites that stop you from leaving by way of an exit popup that you must acknowledge before you can leave? It’s a common tool used by internet marketers. Usually it says “Wait! I have a special gift for you on the next page” or they are offering you a $10 discount off of what they are selling. I was approving ads at one of my websites last nite and I came across a website that had SIX exit popups! I was totally blown away. That is just plain overkill and serves no other purpose than to piss off your website visitors. Every time I acknowledged an exit pop another one would appear and then another and I could not leave that site until I had clicked to acknowledge all six of them.  Needless to say I declined that ad as I will not subject my members to that kind of tactic. Two exit pops is plenty.

I am not going to name the site in question but it has now been banned from every site in my network. I figure if you have to resort to that to sell whatever it is you are flogging then you need a new product or you need to hire a professional copywriter. Not only that your site would be banned from Traffic Exchanges and Safelists so you limit your affiliate’s ability to promote your product

I certainly would not buy from a site that subjected me to that. That brought back memories of the “good ol’ days” where popups and popunders were everywhere and everytime you closed one popup another one or two or three would appear. Thankfully we all have popup blockers in our web browsers or toolbars.