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 books tend to perform better on a certain day of the week.
The conclusion: they don’t! We looked at historical data to compare the average click through rate (CTR) on BookBub Featured Deals for each day of the week. We found that over the past several months, the day of the week with the best average CTR was barely 3.5 percent higher than the overall average. In other words, BookBub subscribers tend to click on books at roughly the same rate regardless of the day, as the following chart shows:
On top of that, the chart below illustrates that the average conversion rate (the percentage of clicks that turn into sales) for each day of the week was even more consistent.
And finally, the average purchase rate, which tells us what percentage of subscribers actually purchased a book on a given day, differed by just 0.03 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. It’s possible, for instance, that certain days are better for gaining exposure on some retailers, but we don’t have data on that (yet).
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 lack of consensus on when to run a price promotion is due to the fact that timing is not a strong indicator of performance. So rather than focusing too much on when your promotion runs, invest your energy in making your book as appealing as possible, so readers will buy it whenever it runs.
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