

Groupon daily emails and RSS feeds, a lesson in nagging and timing - a4agarwal
http://sachin.posterous.com/groupon-daily-emails-and-rss-feeds-a-lesson-i

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mrshoe
To anyone sending emails (including posterous), I'd recommend going beyond A/B
tests. You should know the optimal time to contact _each user_.

For new users you can intentionally send emails at various times (and days of
the week). Then you can track a time-specific clickthru rate for each user.
Eventually you'll converge on one or more optimal times/days. You can
accomplish this with a machine learning algorithm or you can simply track the
timestamp of each user's last N clicks and use that to decide when to email
them. Precision isn't of the essence here, but I've found that clickthru rates
can be _dramatically_ affected by picking the right time of day and day of
week.

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patio11
You need an awful lot of clicks to get time-specific CTR, and that strikes me
as unlikely with most services, but it takes _zero_ clicks to identify one
time the user is at the computer ("the anniversary hour:minute of their
signup") and one click to identify a time at which they open the email (the
time at which they opened any email from you, causing a download of your web
bug, or clicked from the email to your website).

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adityakothadiya
May be it's just me that I'm not so impulsive buyer as Sachin. But here is
what I do when I see the Groupon deal - ponder upon if I want to buy this or
not. Of course, the % discount is always incredible, there is no question
about it, so I know I'm going to get it at lot cheaper price than I usually
do. But the pondering is always about - do I need it? So the moment I see a
Groupon deal, I can't decide right away that I want to buy it or not. I keep
pondering over it till afternoon, and most of the times I purchased the deals
in the late afternoon or evening. So it takes some time for me to see the
deal, and then make the decision. I can't think of myself making the decision
within few minutes after I see the deal, and that too before sleep after a
tiring day of work. So I actually don't mind getting these emails in the
morning, when I'm fresh and ready to get started for the day. So not sure if
the pattern Sachin wrote about is most common or the pattern I'm seeing is
common. Yeah, that's when A/B testing will help.

~~~
a4agarwal
I'm a very impulsive buyer. If I see something I like (or is a good deal), I
just do it. You should see my Amazon order history, it's been pretty insane
since I got Prime :)

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ajg1977
Ironically, the "Daily Posterous Subscriptions" email I receive every day
suffers from exactly the same issue that their co-founder has observed in
another service.

Because it always seems to be sent around 4:30am and is relatively low value,
it's one of the first emails I delete during my morning inbox routine.

~~~
a4agarwal
I agree, and we'll be changing this. Thanks!

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dalore
It could be they have so many emails to send out and they don't wont them to
be flagged as spam so they stagger them.

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aresant
If you have a list, you can drive monster gains via basic A/B testing of
components.

\- Time of day sends make huge differences, early AMs test well for us despite
article's counter point.

\- Highest open rates are Sunday but Tuesday we see highest level of
transactions.

\- Including company name in your email can increase opens and clicks
substantially.

etc etc - so much good data on this topic - particuarlly the first link:

[http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/tactics/best-time-
to-...](http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/tactics/best-time-to-send/)

[http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/personalizing-
your-...](http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/personalizing-your-email-
subjects-can-drop-your-conversion-rate/#more-614)

<http://www.mailermailer.com/resources/metrics/index.rwp>

