Best Time to Send Email Campaigns

What’s the best time to send email? This is a fundamental question you’ll have to answer in your email marketing strategy. Getting your timing right is crucial because it is going to impact open rates, click-through rates, traffic volume, and, most importantly, conversions.

Luckily, the average person spends 30 hours a week checking their email. This does not include the time spent reading and considering the content.

So, how can you, as a business owner, capitalize on all this time spent checking emails to get the highest open rates and return on energy? Well, today let’s discuss the best time to send email campaigns based on recent research on the topic.

1. What is the Best Day to Send Emails

According to MailChimp, you should prioritise your send days in this order:

• Tuesday: This is the best day to send emails.
• Thursday: If you send two emails per week, use Thursday to send your second email.
• Wednesday: This is the second more popular day to send emails.
  

MailChimp found that the highest open rates occurred on Tuesday and Thursday. As can be seen in the data below, weekends have a significant drop in opens.

However, this depends on the content that you send. Most business related content will be ignored over the weekend in preference for recreational content. Nonetheless, the optimal time to send an email will always be during the workweek.

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The research above comes from Dan Zarella, who finds that the best days to send are Saturday and Sunday. However, he also warns that these days also see higher bounces and abuse reports.

2. When is the Best Time to Send Emails

While there are many different times to send emails, here’s what data from WordStream suggests:

• 10 a.m.: Late morning sending is the most popular with 10 a.m. being the time many businesses send their emails.
• 8 p.m. to Midnight: It may surprise you, however, emails sent late in the evening have a high open rate and click through. This is likely due to people checking their emails before they go to bed.
• 2 p.m.: This seems to be a successful time to target inboxes right before people check out from work or looking for a distraction.
• 6 a.m.: Since 50% of people check their emails first thing in the morning, this makes sense.

Note: Many of these times focuses on specific time zones. Be sure to find a time that works for the majority of your audience. For example, if you’re in the U.S., Eastern Time would is a zone that covers 50% of the population. If you cannot, segment your lists to ensure your emails are being sent at the right time in the right places.  

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It seems the best times to send emails occurs between 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with 53% of emails opened during the workday.

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Research from Customer.io suggests that it may be common practice to check emails in the morning, most people are just beginning their day and unlikely to click through.

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Research from Customer.io suggests that it may be common practice to check emails in the morning, most people are just beginning their day and unlikely to click through. To maximize your marketing efforts, it may be better to send emails later in the day.

3. Timing is Critical

Hopefully, you have an idea as to some of the best times to send your email campaign. Before you set up your campaign and click send, there’s one more critical point to remember:

Emails have the best chance of being opened within an hour after they arrive in your inbox.

A study by GetResponse found that open rates drop to less than 5% after 4 hours. After 24 hours, opens drop to less than 1%. So, your best chance to get people to open your emails is to send them at a time your subscribers are most likely to read them.

4. The Controversy of Sending Emails

The email send times you saw at the beginning of this article may have been informative or completely misguiding. There’s a reason for that.

Even though research makes suggestions, the best time or day to send your emails depends entirely on your audience.

If that’s true, why do so many studies continue to suggest that Tuesday at 10 a.m. is the most successful?

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Every industry has some similarities, but there are some distinctive differences in their results. The best thing you can do for your email campaign is to test your audience.

Don’t just test the day and time, you should also be testing the following:

• Subject
• Content
• Call-to-action

These all play an important role as to whether or not someone is going to open or ignore your email.

Click here to read our Ecommerce Email Marketing Guide.

5. Know Your Audience. Pick Your Strategy

Be sure to include analytics software to track and monitor the success of your email campaigns. Most email marketing software will include tracking tools so you can gain insights of your audience.

Ideally, you’ll only be able to improve your emails if you know how to serve your audience. Be sure you know who you’re creating email content for.

Are your readers busy entrepreneurs who plan on checking their email over lunch or small business owners who get home late? Is your content loaded with promotions? Or is it leisurely and informative?

You should adjust your timing and find the days that work best with your audience. Find the right times and deliver content that fit into their daily schedules. If possible, try running different campaigns with the same email content to find the best schedule that works. Take note of when your emails get the most clicks, then send all subsequent campaigns following the timeline that achieves the most results.

Are you ready to click send on your email campaign?