Timing is Everything: What is the Best Day of the Week to Send an Email to Your Customers?

In This Article…

If you’ve implemented an email marketing program and want to optimize how many people open and click-through your email, knowing what day of the week and at what time of day to send your email is a key element to improving metrics. Sending on the wrong day can impact your email performance negatively. In this article Comm100 will explain when the best days are to send email and what the best time of day to send is.

Is Timing Really Important?

If only sending a successful email campaign were as simple as putting together a compelling offer, a great creative, an enticing subject line and sending your message. But it’s not! In the quest to get your users to open an email, the day and time that you send an email is also incredibly important. Continue reading to find out when is best for you to send.

The Open Rate Tail: Don’t Send Day-Of Emails

The first thing that you need to know is that, while a large portion of your recipients are going to open your email the day that they receive it, not all of them will. As people visit their inboxes less frequently during the day and instead hit social networks, the number of days it takes between sending an email and a user reading it has grown. It used to be a commonly accepted metric that a marketing email or newsletters had a three day “open tail”. These days, most people allow up to five days for stragglers to open emails.

This is important to you if you send emails that relate to specific events. For example, an email about a prediction on a sports event or last minute tickets to a concert. Sending the email the day of the event means that, by the time a significant portion of your audience reads the email, the event will be over. At a minimum, send your email three days before the target event. If you want to be extra safe, increase that to five days.

What Time Is It?

It’s not between 8:00am and 9:00am EST if you’re an email marketer! According to a Pivotal Veracity study, early morning email delivery has the lowest open rates. This makes sense since the first time most people check their email is when they arrive at work, and the common habit is to delete anything unimportant in order to reduce clutter before the day starts.

If you’re emailing in North America, the vast majority of the population leaves in the Eastern Standard time zone. Subsequently, it’s best to focus your email send time on hitting that particular time zone (unless you have the capability to segment your list by geographic location and send in staggered sends).

While metrics are different for everybody, as a general rule, the best open rates tend to be seen in emails that are sent around lunch time (noon or 1:00pm) EST. This also makes logical sense as people tend to relax a bit with their inboxes at lunch.

The Day Dilemma

There are a few fast and easy rules about the best days to send. But as Comm100 will discuss at the conclusion of this article, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t test to find out if they hold true for you.

Monday Blues: Monday’s are considered the worst day to send mass email if open rate is important to you (and, of course, open rate is important to you). The logic, again, involves the theory that most people spend most of their inbox time at work. When you come into work on a Monday, you instantly start deleting anything that seems like junk or unimportant email so that your inbox isn’t as overwhelming to you. This theory has been backed up by numbers in many email marketing studies. Unless your users have proven to exhibit a different pattern or you have a compelling reason to send on Monday, avoid Monday sends!

Weekend Warriors: It’s also a fact that internet activity in general reduces on weekends. This may be because people spend more time with their families, get outdoors more or are just burnt out from all their enforced online time during the week. Almost every online metric category slips on the weekends, and that includes email opens. Avoid big weekend blasts.

Midweek is the Best Week: Most studies support that sending email on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday will yield the best results. So, if you boil it down, you want to send your email campaign on a midweek day in the afternoon.

Rules Are Meant to Be Broken: Make Sure These Hold True for You

Despite all of the rules above, the number one rule of email marketing is “Test. Then test again.” Your particular user base may respond very well to Monday or weekend emails. Maybe you have a lot of mothers who are up early and online, opening emails. The only way to know for sure is to test various send times and establish the best practices for your own list. Even within your list, different list segments may respond in different ways.

If you follow the “Midweek, Midday” rule, you will certainly get decent response rates. Then you can build on that by running some tests to figure out if there may be a more optimized time to send to your email list! Just be sure you remember to keep track of what you sent when!

No matter what day of the week works best for you, the first step in creating a successful email campaign is to select an email partner that meets your needs. Comm100, who provided you with this complimentary summary email sending best practices, offers a completely free, hosted email marketing and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off of the ground whether you’re practicing the “Midweek, Midday” rule or trying to tempt weekend email warriors! Check it out at http://www.comm100.com/emailmarketingnewsletter/.