Best time to send email campaigns

Delivering an email marketing campaign isn’t just a matter of pressing “go” and then reaping the benefits, there has to be a certain amount of strategy that goes behind it. One major factor that will influence your open-rate and click-through-rate is the date and time that the email is sent.

This isn’t to say that there’s a definite time that you should send your emails, as every demographic is different and, depending on your audience, the most effective time to send emails may be different.

Our Experience

We’ve been creating effective email marketing campaigns for many years now, and have tested, split-tested, split-tested those results and split-tested again until our fingers were numb, so we have a pretty good idea of the best time to send an email marketing campaign.

Take a look at the difference between sending an email campaign at different times, on different days:

It’s clear from the above pie-chart  that the least effective days to send an email campaign would be Monday & Friday, regardless of the time of day. The most effective day altogether was Wednesday, with a huge open rate of 46.1% on a Wednesday afternoon. This was shortly followed by afternoons on Tuesdays & Thursdays. Overall, mornings proved less successful (we put this down to people getting a little bored towards the end of a work day).

Conclusion

From the evidence above, it’s clear that the most effective time to send emails is Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday in the afternoon. Although sending emails in the afternoon would be more effective, sending emails in the morning would still work greater than on Mondays or Fridays.

From experience, it’s never a good idea to send email newsletters on the weekend. A lot of emails in your list will be work emails, and will be buried by the time people get to work on a Monday morning.

The photograph at the top of this post was taken by Wireguy, and was taken from Flickr.