The Best Times to Send an Email Marketing Campaign

Chances are you put a lot of TLC into your email marketing campaigns, ensuring that they look and read well - and of course have plenty of interesting content. But what do you know about the best time of day to send your email campaigns?

While every industry can garner different results and it will be a matter of testing the waters for yourself, research has revealed what are statistically considered to be the best days of the week and the best times of the day.

So if you need some guidance, this information should be useful.

Overall best days

Research was conducted by marketing software company Responsys that analysed 1 billion email marketing messages sent by 350 marketers within Australia. The research found out the following: 

• Thursday delivers the highest average open rates in the week at 22%
• Tuesday has the highest click-through rate at 9%

Overall worst days

Besides weekends, these days are:

• Monday and Friday are the worst days for open rates
• Friday delivers the lowest click-through rate

Best times of the day

Research was performed by email marketing company Pure360 to find this out. The results were as follows:

• 9am - 10am: A good time to send out emails, consumers (typically at work) are looking through emails and are receptive to offers.
• 3pm - 5pm: Apathy sets in for people at work and they have a greater tendency to check out property and financial service emails, but all campaigns have a greater chance of being viewed.
• 5pm - 7pm: Consumers who are working late will be inclined to look at emails promoting holidays and B2B promotions.
• 7pm - 10pm: Offers in relations to clothes and special interests (e.g. gym promotions) perform well during this period.

Test it for yourself

As always, the ideal time for your email campaigns may not be the same as other industries, but you can use this information as a reference point to begin with. The best technicque is to use this data to work out the theoretical best time to send out your campaign. Send out a selection of emails using that criteria until you have enough results to compare against and then change one of the aspects, e.g the time you send it out, but keep the same day, and see if you notice any significant differences.

Think about your own target audience.

• Are they more likely to commute and read emails on the way to and from work?
• Are they business people that will need to fit it into their working day?
• Are they more likely to read emails at home infront of the TV?
• When time do your competitors send emails. Do you want to send at the same time, or be completely separate?

Continuously analyse the success of your campaigns to find what works for you.

If you have any questions contact us.