The Best Time to Send Ecommerce Email Marketing Messages to Sell Makeup

Written by Anthony Carter | Last modified on:

Ecommerce Email Marketing

There’s a time and a place for everything according to an old saying. When it comes to email marketing messages to sell makeup, this is especially true. The day your messages are received, followed closely by the time they are received determines to a large extent the number of “opens” you’ll get, which, in turn, has a profound effect upon your conversion rate. After all, you can’t convert people who don’t open your message—right?

Know Your Audience

You have to have a clear picture to whom you’re talking before you can determine the best time to send email marketing messages. You want to have a feel for the nature of their schedule from day-to-day. When you’re marketing cosmetics, you’ll be looking at many different types of women. Are you targeting teens, young adults, or older professional women? Each has a different schedule and is likely to be open to email marketing messages at different times. Saturday night is a total bust for younger people, as their minds tend to be more on partying. Similarly, weekend mornings will miss young mothers, who will likely be more involved in caring for their children.

Personalization Reaps Rewards

More than just including your customer’s name in the subject line, you must make sure the subject line and the body content have specific relevance to their needs. The best way to do this is to keep track of their purchase history, response to previous messages and search patterns within your site. This means your choice of ecommerce software should help you gather those metrics so you can design your email marketing messages accordingly.

Craft Intriguing Subject Lines

You can nail the perfect send time dead on, but if your email message has a lousy subject line, or doesn’t speak directly to the recipient’s interest with a compelling offer, timing won’t matter. Many best practices recommend designing subject line messages based primarily upon adjectives, verbs, and adverbs to make them hit harder and pique the recipient’s curiosity. Key words include “save”, “learn”, “take” and “see”. For example, if your goal is to sell makeup, something along the lines of; “Linda, Learn 15 Ways to Make Your Eyes Smolder,” will attract the attention of your key demographic, regardless of age.

Try Before You Fly

Today, most email messages are read on a mobile device. If you want your messages to get a response, you’ll have to make sure they’re formatted to play well on mobile. This means they have to be tight, punchy, to the point and enhanced by a compelling photograph composed to work on a smaller screen. To be certain your message looks good to all recipients, you should test them on iOS devices as well as Android.

Choose Your Day and Time Wisely

Studies by email marketing companies such as MailChimp have shown the best day of the week to send ecommerce email marketing messages for products like makeup is Tuesday, followed closely by Thursday and Wednesday. With that in mind, a good strategy is to plan two blasts a week, the first on Tuesday and a second one on Thursday. This gets their attention in the early part of the week and reminds them on Thursday.

As for the time of day, given your goal is to sell cosmetics, you want your messages to land when your customers are likely to be thinking about their personal needs and have time to place an order. These sorts of messages tend to be ignored first thing in the morning when people are focused upon getting their days started.

In most cases, the best time for messages about items like cosmetics is in the afternoon, right around 2p for office workers and students who are relaxing a bit right after lunch. Another great time to send is in the evening between 8p and midnight to catch people checking their phones just before retiring for the evening. It’s important to pay attention to time zones. After all, 2p on the west coast is 5p on the east coast. You want your messages to land at the prime time in each zone, so you’ll have to stagger your sends based upon your customers’ physical locations.

Monitor Your Results

To fine tune your campaigns, try different times within these recommendations, based upon the proclivities of your target market. Once you see what your actual results are, you’ll be better-positioned have your messages arrive when your key demographic is most receptive.