If you’re planning on running a book promotion, you may be wondering how long you should run your promotion for, or if one day of the week is better than another for running a promotion. We took a look at our daily deals email open and click rates to get an answer, and here is what we found.
Email Open Time Averages
The average first open time of our daily deals emails for the last full month (May) was 16.8 hours. However, 72.8% of emails were opened in the first 10 hours, and these 72.8% had an average first open time of 3.4 hours. The remaining 27.2% had an average first open time of 52.6 hours.
In other words, with a one-day promotion, about three-fourths of the subscribers (in your rating and genre) who would click on your book will have time to actually open the email. If you’re only able to do a one-day promotion, that means you’re reaching the majority of your audience. However, if you’re able to run a longer promotion, three days seems to be the best length to catch that last fourth of subscribers who will eventually click.
Email Click Averages
Perhaps a better metric would be email clicks, since some readers may never click on books even if they open an email, and others may be blocking the tracking pixels that tells us that they opened the email.
The average first click on our daily deals email for May was 14.6 hours. However, 68.8% of subscribers clicked in the first 10 hours, and these had an average first click time of 3.8 hours. The remaining 32.2% had an average first click time of 38.5 hours.
The clicks tell a similar story that the open times do. But for these, fewer readers click on the first day, and the remaining that click after the first day appear to do so sooner. Again, it looks like a two- or three-day promotion will get you better results than a one-day promotion. Of course, these are averages, so if you have a perma-free book or a book that will be discounted for longer than a few days, it’s best to list it on our site as long as possible to catch those few outliers.
Clicks per Day
Now, does the day of the week affect when our subscribers click on books? We looked back at the last three months of data, and we found that for those who click, there is less than a two percent difference from the highest to lowest days, and it doesn’t follow any pattern. So with our subscribers on Book Cave, the day of the week doesn’t seem to have any bearing on the number of clicks a book gets.
Note that this graph shows what percentage of the clicks for the week are made each day, and the percentages add up to 100%.
Let us know if you have any questions in the comments below!
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