Should you schedule a price promotion for a Friday to reach readers before the weekend? Or is Monday better because people are checking their email? Our partners have many theories about the best day of the week to promote an ebook, but there is little consensus. So we did some of our own investigating to find out whether BookBub Featured Deals tend to perform better on a certain day of the week.
The conclusion: they don’t by a significant amount. We looked at historical data to compare the average open rate of the BookBub Featured Deals email for each day of the week, which would let us see whether overall engagement levels with our emails differed by day. We found that over the past several months, the day of the week with the best average open rate was barely one percent higher than the overall average. In other words, BookBub subscribers tend to engage with BookBub’s Featured Deals emails at roughly the same rate regardless of the day, as the following chart shows:
On top of that, the average purchase rate, which tells us what percentage of subscribers actually purchased a book on a given day, differed by just 0.08 percentage points between the best and worst day of the week.
We should note that this analysis is based on BookBub’s subscriber response rates, and does not necessarily apply to the wider ebook market.
And of course, this isn’t to say that the timing of your promotion doesn’t matter at all. No two books are exactly the same, and when you decide to do a discount may depend on the specific marketing goals you have in mind. For example, it might make sense to strategically price around the date of a new release, or to coordinate your promotion with a special event.
However, based on what we’ve observed, it seems likely that the day of the week your price promotion runs is not a strong indicator of performance. So know that readers will find your book just as enticing no matter which day it lands in their inbox!
Want to share this post? Here’s are ready-made tweets:
Click to tweet: Is there a better day of the week to discount your ebook? @BookBub dug into the data! http://bit.ly/2tukdpR
Click to tweet: Does it matter which day of the week you run a @BookBub Featured Deal? #pubtip http://bit.ly/2tukdpR
This post was originally published on November 20, 2013 and has been updated with the latest data.
