There’s no perfect time to send an email.
The simple answer: it depends.
What type of business do you run?
What type of content is in your emails?
There are a multitude of variables that will affect how many opens and clicks your emails get. However, considering there are over 300 billion emails sent every day (yes, that’s 300+ billion), you need to be optimizing your campaigns to ensure they get seen.
In this article, we’re going to look at the best time to send emails to help you get the most eyes and the most engagement on every single campaign you send.
The results will vary depending on your business, but these are good benchmarks to guide your decisions.
📑 In this post you will find:
Does Your Email Send Time Really Matter?
Assuming you have a large list of email subscribers already, you should be optimizing your campaign send time for the highest open and click-through rate.
If you’re missing out on engagement simply because your audience doesn’t see your email, you’re leaving opportunities on the table.
Every good email sending platform contains detailed reporting on open and click-through-rate (CTR), so even if you’re not a marketer by trade, you’ll be able to figure out how well your campaigns are performing.
Best Day To Send Emails
The first consideration when you’re sending an email newsletter or promotional email is what day to send it on.
Should you send it at the weekend, when most people are at home? Or maybe a weekday when people are checking their emails at work?
In this section, let’s look at data gathered by email service providers Campaign Monitor and GetResponse to find out the best days to send your emails.
Open Rates
Based on global averages, the best day to send an email if you care about open rates is Tuesday.
Data shows the average open rate is 18.3%.
The second best day to send emails is Thursday, which sees an 18% open rate.
As you can see, there isn’t a huge difference either way. But, if you’re regularly sending emails to a large list, even a couple of percentage points can have a large effect on your results.
Click-Through Rates
Open rates are a good benchmark, but click-through rates are more useful as they reflect how interesting the content of your emails is (rather than just the subject line).
Your open rates could be industry-beating, but if no one is clicking on the links you want them to, it doesn’t matter.
Campaign Monitor data shows that the day with the highest click-through rates is tied between Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Sunday.
Most brands see an average of 2.6% CTR on those days.However, the data from GetResponse differs slightly.
Their studies saw brands getting CTRs of 2.94% on Monday and Tuesday.
Best Time of the Day to Send Emails
So, we know that your emails are most likely to get opened on Tuesday.
But, that doesn’t mean you can send out a campaign at 4 AM and still see results.
When reading this next section, keep in mind that you should send out your emails at the time your audience is most likely to read it. You’re not emailing the ‘average’ person that these studies look at.
Use your own data to figure out what works, and what doesn’t in your email marketing.
This could coincide with their commute when they open their emails at work, or on the weekend during their downtime.
Keep your buyer persona in mind,
Open Rates
If you’re looking for high open rates, think of when your audience is most likely to be checking their inbox.
Data shows that brands see the highest average open rate at 1 PM, with 22.15% of all emails being opened.
There’s also a spike in open rates at 6 AM, which coincides with most people waking up and checking their phones.
Data shows that emails don’t tend to get opened often between 2 PM and 5 PM (with another spike again at 6 PM).
This is likely because most people tend to check their emails in the morning so they can focus on their core work in the afternoon.
Click-Through Rates
As you would expect, the CTR data reflects the open rate data.
The highest CTR happens at 6 AM, increases at 12 – 1 PM, and dips throughout the afternoon.
As I mentioned, you shouldn’t base your email marketing campaigns solely on third-party data.
Look at your past campaigns to see when your audience is opening, clicking, and engaging with your emails for the most accurate data.
You could then use this data to run A/B tests to see if it’s worth sending your campaigns at different times.
In many cases, you might see completely different results from what we’ve seen here, and that’s okay.
Improving Open and Click-Through Rates
If your campaigns are seeing lower-than-average open and click-through rates, consider making some updates to your email marketing strategy.
Only Send Important Emails
If you’re emailing your subscribers every day, they’ll quickly get fatigued. They’ll unsubscribe or ignore your emails.
Consider only sending emails once or twice per week and ensure they’re packed with value. Once your audience knows the content is genuinely useful or interesting, they’ll open your emails every time they land in their inbox.
Test Your Subject Lines
If your subject line isn’t interesting, people won’t open your email.
The subject line gives your audience an idea of what’s inside your email, so it’s hugely important.
Most email marketing platforms will allow you to split test subject lines so you can begin to learn what type of subject lines make your audience tick.
Summary: When Should You Be Sending Emails?
So, in summary:
The contents of your emails don’t even matter if your audience doesn’t even open them.
You should be optimizing your email sending time to get the best results.
Send emails when you know your audience is going to engage with them.
That could mean scheduling your send in the morning, so your email is in your audience’s inbox when they wake up, or it could be sending it at 11 AM when they’re likely to be checking their inbox.
The data in this post can act as a guide if you’re setting up a brand new campaign, but the key is to continuously monitor and iterate based on how your campaigns perform and when your audience is most engaged.
