Happy accidents are perhaps the most wonderful gift a small business or digital marketer can have. It’s those accidental discoveries that can fuel growth or even change our business plans completely. You have a random discussion with a stranger that sheds light on a new audience segment. Or you misspell a word in your pay-per-click keywords only to find out hundreds of others misspell it, too, and it drives a huge wad of unexpected traffic to your website.
Happy accidents are simply wonderful.
One happened to me last week. There was an annoying technical snafu with my email newsletter. I’d scheduled it to go out at 6:35 p.m. on Sunday night. GoDaddy sent me a notice about the snafu, so I rescheduled it for 9 p.m. Sunday night.
Another notice came so I called support. They claimed to have fixed the problem, so I rescheduled the email for 8:55 a.m. Monday. That time came and went and still another notice arrived that the email didn’t fire. Another round of support, this time ultimately fixing the problem, but my window had passed.
Based on data from previous email marketing sends and anecdotal data I’d collected from others with active email newsletters in the marketing space, I’ve been sending my newsletters either early Sunday evening (between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.) or early Monday morning (between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m.). Seems like folks in our space like to consume email newsletters to start their week.
But I’d missed my window thanks to the technical snafu. What would I do? I just scheduled it for 11:35 a.m. Monday and chalked one up to a glitch. It was just one week so it wouldn’t hurt much.
Guess what?
Monday’s newsletter saw a 129% increase in open rates and a 250% increase in engagement. My happy accident led to my most read newsletter of the year.
So much for the data I relied upon, right?
The lesson is not, however, to ignore the data you have. It is, however, to always be testing. By pushing the send time later in the morning on Monday, I discovered a new window of good engagement. At least this once. It may work this week (I’m repeating the timing to test) but it may not.
Still, if I get set in my ways of posting when my old data says is best and fail to continue testing new times, new styles and such, I miss out on the happy accidents that lead us to greener pastures.
Have you stumbled upon a happy accident lately? Tell me about it in the comments!