Best Practices to Communicate with your Customers Online
Think about you spend your day—what times are you scrolling through social media or checking your emails and texts?
Check out the industry tips below on when to post on Facebook and Instagram, and when to send out email and text blasts to your customers.
FACEBOOK – BEST TIMES TO POST & BEST PRACTICES
Best Times to Post
The best times to post on Facebook for a business in the B2C sector would be between 9:00 – 10:00 am, 11:00 am to 12:00 pm, and 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm on workdays. These are the hours when workers would be on their break.
- Monday: 1 PM, 2 PM, 3PM
- Tuesday: 1 PM, 2 PM, 3PM
- Wednesday: 11 AM, 1 PM
- Thursday: 5 PM, 8 PM
- Friday: 11 AM, 11 AM
Additional Tips
Knowing when to post on your Facebook profile can have a huge impact on your audience engagement. When people come across your post at the right time, they are most likely to like and share it. When they do so, it lets Facebook know that people are interested in your content and the ranking improves.
INSTAGRAM – BEST TIMES TO POST & BEST PRACTICES
Best Times to Post
- Monday: 6 AM, 10 AM, 10 PM
- Tuesday: 2 AM, 4 AM, 9 AM
- Wednesday: 7 AM, 8 AM, 9 AM
- Thursday: 7 AM, 8 AM, 11 PM
- Friday: 5 AM, 1 PM, 3 PM
- Saturday: 11 AM, 7 PM, 8 PM
- Sunday: 7 AM, 8 AM, 4 PM
Additional Tips
Consistency and quality are vital elements in improving your engagement. Some accounts will see engagement with little effort, but if you’re just starting out, this is likely not the case for you. You need to post regularly to grow your account – this can be as much as one to three posts per day.
EMAIL BLASTS
EMAIL BLASTS – BEST TIMES TO SEND & BEST PRACTICES
Best Times to Send
Mid-Week, Mid-Day: The tried-and-true traditional approach of sending out email campaigns is in the middle of the week, towards the middle of the day.
Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are the best days of the week to press send, and sending in the time blocks of 9:00 am – 11:00 am, and 1:00 pm -3:00 pm often result in the highest open rates.
Additional Tips
Bad open rates are not just affected by the day and/or time you choose to send your email. If your open rates are not looking so good, consider these factors as well:
- Do You Have a Standout Subject Line? – Subject lines are HUGE when it comes to email marketing. You could argue that subject lines are even more important than the email copy, since it’s the subject lines’ job to get people to open your message to begin with. Make sure you have a saucy, enticing subject line and you’re not making common subject line mistakes.
- Are You Sending Too Many Emails? – No one likes to have an inbox flooded with emails from the same company. Could your low open rates be the result of sending out too many emails? When your messages start to feel like spam, unsubscribes can start.
- Is Your Message Mobile-Friendly? – Your emails absolutely must be mobile-friendly!
- Is Your Email Copy Unclear? – Get to the point from the start and add details down below. Don’t hide the important information, keep it at the top – loud and proud.
TEXT BLASTS
TEXT BLASTS – BEST TIMES TO SEND & BEST PRACTICES
Best Times to Send
- Send around mid morning/early afternoon during the work week.
- Know your audience. Who are they? Put yourself in their shoes, when would you want to receive a text?
- Marketing is all about testing to see what works best for your audience. Adjust and adapt the send time based on open rates and responses.
Additional Tips
Text messages have a 98% open rate, which means it’s tempting to overlook the importance of when you schedule a campaign. Even with high open rates, you want high engagement too as the average person checks their mobile phone 150 times a day. So you want to catch them at the optimal time so they engage with your content one of those 150 times they read a message.
PRESS RELEASE
PRESS RELEASE – DISTRIBUTION TIPS & BEST PRACTICES
Gone are the days where the “press” only extends to traditional media like TV, radio, and newspapers. Utilizing press releases in your marketing strategy allows you to advertise your practice’s new treatments across a wide variety of news and information platforms.
Social Strategy1, Rohrer Aesthetics’ marketing partner, partners with EIN Presswire to publish press releases. EIN has direct relationships with thousands of local, national, and international news sources—each with their own unique set of users. When a press release is published on “the wire,” relevant news sources can view your post and choose to reshare it to the viewers on their platform.
My Press Release is Published. Now What?
After a press release is published, it’s important that your practice focuses on a distribution strategy. While working with EIN Presswire helps get your practice’s exciting news out to the press, you can use your press release to your advantage to boost interest and engagement among your existing customer base.
Key Benefits to a Press Release Distribution Strategy
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Keeps your company fresh in people’s minds – You never want to go off the radar screen of your clients and prospects. If they forget about you, they could wind up doing business with one of your competitors instead. By sending out press releases to clients, prospects, vendors, etc. on a regular basis, you keep your name fresh in their minds and help cultivate long-term relationships based on trust and familiarity.
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Educates them about your company – An informed client is the best client. The better your clients and prospects understand who you are, what you offer, and what you stand for, the likelier they are to do business with you and be satisfied. They’re also likelier to refer you to others because they’ll be able to speak more authoritatively about your company.
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Reinforces current clients’ decision to hire you – Your clients want to know that they’re working with the right practice. They like seeing positive stories about your company because it justifies their decision to do business with you. It boosts your value and credibility in their eyes.
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Creates the perception that you’re constantly getting press coverage – Perception is everything. When your clients and prospects are seeing news blurbs from your practice on a regular basis, they are likely to assume that your practice is getting a lot of media coverage and doing well.
Key Press Release Distribution Tips
Knowing how important a press release distribution strategy is for your business, see below for three best practices that your practice can do to boost the overall success of your press release.
1. Promote Key Placements on Social Media
After issuing your release, follow up with a social media release. A social media press release includes one (or more) photos or a video, a 90-character or less description (depending on the social media channel) to grab attention, and a link to the full release.
To capture the attention of readers scrolling a social media feed, begin your press release with “BREAKING:” or “Just announced:” and then summarize your news. Add the hashtag #pressrelease to make your release easily discoverable by journalists.
For even more attention and credibility, include a link to a key placement where your release was published. For example, if you are a medical practice and your news was picked up by DermWorld, link to your release on that publication’s website, and tag the publication and the reporter who covered it in your social media press announcement.
Pro tip: For added traction, consider creating different versions of your social media press release by mixing and matching associated videos, images, links, and descriptions, and then publishing them at optimal times. Using a tool like Buffer can help you determine the best time to publish your social media release depending on when your audience is most engaged.
2. Send an Email and/or Text Blast to your Customers
After your press release is published, be sure to send out an email and/or text blast with links to the press release to your current customers!
Even for those customers that may have been coming to your practice for years, it’s important that your current customer base are one of the first groups to know about any news you share. Not only does this sharing provide more credibility for your business, but it keeps your practice fresh in your customers’ minds as they look to book additional services in the future.
To capture the attention of customers scrolling through their email or text inbox, begin your email subject or text with “BREAKING:” or “Just announced:” and then summarize your news. Use the secondary subject in emails to further explain the announcement!
3. Send Thank You Notes
When a journalist covers your news, send a courtesy email telling them you appreciate the coverage. Or stand out by mailing a handwritten thank-you note to them at their publication’s address. This address can usually be found on the publication’s website.
In your note, tell them you would like to be of equal assistance to them and so are available if they need quotes in the future for their pieces. Additionally, share a link to their story on social media to help it reach more people.