are the engagement numbers for sunday correct? it appears to be highest, which doesn't match the conclusions.
[edit: maybe i'm not understanding, but engagement on sunday is highest at 47, yet the final recommendation is for "Tuesday or Wednesday" (35 and 39). why wouldn't you choose the day with highest engagement?]
[also, incidentally, those numbers are all the same to within a couple of standard deviations (1 sd ~ sqrt(n) ~ 6). so the sample size is too small to draw any really firm conclusions.]
It looks like the conclusion is overly simplistic (but it's a blog entry based on a single experiment, so it's quite reasonable to limit it to simple conclusions)
If I understand the data correctly, Sunday has a low open rate, but of those that open, it had very high engagement rate.
The author seems to be saying that the open rate is low enough to make Sunday a "bad day", but that really depends on what your email is about.
If getting people to read the email is your priority, then avoid Sunday, but if you mostly care about getting them to respond in some way, then Sunday could be good - those that read it will have the free time to actually respond.
(Of course, while the limited data provided by this experiment is interesting, it's probably not worth basing any serious decisions on)
What I wanted to share was the fact that there was a noticeable difference to begin with, so it's something worth paying attention to.
The exact pattern will depend on the audience. If it's VmWare emailing IT people, then the open rate is probably going to be the same through the workdays and zero on weekends. If it's some hobby stuff, then it'd be in reverse. For my particular project, it just happens that Saturday sucked, which is a good thing to know.
I certainly think that your experiment has value - my apologies if it came across any other way.
- If nothing else, it shows that there is a difference, and the day you pick for your newsletter matters.
- It seems that it would be helpful for other people to repeat your experiment (but stretch it to 7 days) to see what the results are for their readers.
- The difference between the open rate and engagement rate is quite interesting.
It's actually reasonable. This is an opt-in mailing list and subscribers are generally interested in the project, so if they are hit with a relevant update on their free time, they will respond.
(edit) The rationale behind "Tue/Wed" is that I value views more than votes. Agreed on std.dev., yet Saturday still stands out as the least performing day.
[edit: maybe i'm not understanding, but engagement on sunday is highest at 47, yet the final recommendation is for "Tuesday or Wednesday" (35 and 39). why wouldn't you choose the day with highest engagement?]
[also, incidentally, those numbers are all the same to within a couple of standard deviations (1 sd ~ sqrt(n) ~ 6). so the sample size is too small to draw any really firm conclusions.]