What is the Best Time to Send Emails

Sending emails to prospects at suitable times not only improves click-through and conversion rates but also generates higher ROI from your email marketing campaigns. 

Email marketing plays a significant role when it comes to bringing targeted traffic to your website. However, have you ever wondered what is the best time to send emails? Let us throw some light on this today. 

Importance

Let’s face it, the email list is your cold audience to whom you are going to share your content in expectation that they will visit your website and turn into customers. Nurturing is the next best thing to conversion and so, it is critical that you add an attractive subject line, creative body content and a brief call-to-action into your email.

Sending emails at the appropriate time has its own significance. However, how will I ascertain the correct time? To get the clear picture, some of the top market researchers such as MailChimp, Customer.io, WordStream, GetResponse, Experian and Campaign Monitor have come up with interesting conclusions.  

So, What do the statistics say?

In order to understand the extremely diversified research data, we have tried to summarize it a bit. 

Best day to send emails

• Majority of the market researchers agree that the best day to send emails is Tuesday. According to the data analyzed by both MailChimp and GetResponse, Tuesday recorded the most number of email opens as well as high click-through rates.

• MailChimp concluded that the rate of emails opened on Tuesdays is around 20%, which is way higher than other weekdays and the weekend. Even Experian and Customer.io found high click-through rates on Tuesday.

                                                               (Source: MailChimp)

                                                                                            (Source: CoSchedule)

• Additionally, MailChimp suggests that the second-best day to send email is Thursday and most other researchers agree with the fact. However, the data by MailerMailer analyzes Wednesday and Tuesday as the best days to send emails. It has also been found that Sundays give you the most number of clicks. But Sunday saw the least number of emails sent, too.

(Source: MailerMailer)

Best time to send emails

• Even though the absence of certainty among the market researchers makes the task of identifying the best time quite confusing, a majority of them say that the best time to send email is at around 10 in the morning. 

• Campaign Monitor along with the MailChimp has come to the conclusion that the best time to send email is between 9 to 11 am on the weekdays. Campaign Monitor shows that 53% of emails are opened in the business hours from 9 am to 6 pm. 

(Source: Campaign Monitor)

• MailChimp concludes that sending emails from 10 am to 12 noon would give you more opens. On the other hand, Customer.io’s data shows that the second peak of email opens occur between 2-4pm on weekdays. 

(Source: MailChimp)

• Most of the researchers have done their studies in the Eastern Time Zone as the majority of the population is saturated in that region. 

Weekends are quite lazy

• The researchers have recorded less activity in the inbox during the weekends. This has opened the new doors for struggling businesses to put in extra effort in the weaker competition on weekends to generate better results.  

• According to the data, the open rate on both Saturday and Sunday was 17.8 percent, the highest of the week. However, the volume of sending emails was less on both the days. 

• Note: As the open rate on weekends is higher but the actual number of sending emails is low, the number of opening emails is actually less on the weekend. 

Mobile devices play a key role

• Several years ago, people used to open and read emails on their computers during business hours. However, since the introduction of mobile devices, the figure of checking emails on mobile and tablet devices outside business hours has swelled incredibly. According to the data, 54% of emails are opened on mobile devices. 

• One of the most important things the study, which was earlier done by Experian, has found that the opening of emails on mobile devices is most likely to occur outside the business hours from 5 pm to 8 am. Because people are more prone to check emails on mobile and tablet devices after working hours or before going to bed. 

• On the other hand, the study found that the most number of emails opened on desktops occurred during the business hours. However, the CTR is recorded as the lowest on emails opened on mobile or tablet devices.

So, considering all the researched data, you may come to the conclusion that the best time to send email is Tuesday, at 10 am. However, sending your emails in the middle of the week and at around the time of mid-day should bring a decent email open as well as click-through rates. 

The research has shown that 23% of your total subscribers are most likely to open your emails within 60 minutes once sent. This shows that sending emails 30 minutes prior to the peak time is quite helpful. 

However, time is not everything, when it comes to improving click-through rates. Following are the few important email marketing tips which may result in generating a better ROI. 

• Testing your emails comes in the first place in order to improve the efficiency of your email marketing campaign. Making sure that the email is being rendered properly on every browsing platform with different service providers help you to get a better idea of how exactly your emails are performing. 

You can measure the success of your test email campaign with the help of Google Analytics tool, which would provide a clearer idea.

• Reviewing your email list is the other important thing that you should not miss. Find out how old your email list is? Remove the old existing emails, if required in order to keep it updated.

• Attractive and creative email writing is the most important part. Make your subject line as focused as it can be with an exact punchline. 

• Create a better email marketing campaign with the help of class-apart email automation CRM tools such as Agile CRM. It gives you full control over automating your emails and scoring the leads according to the response. 

With Agile CRM, send attractive emails with the built-in email template feature, manage your email campaign effectively with A/B testing and send automated emails to unresponsive leads for better drip marketing. It is an omni-channel solution to all of your email marketing worries.

• Limit yourself from sending a large trail of emails and keep in mind the frequency of it. Segmenting all your leads only help you in achieving targets in your email marketing campaign. 

• Knowing your audience is the key factor. Be flexible to send emails according to the schedule of your audience. Find out what your audience is looking forward to read and what you are actually serving to them.

The main purpose of the whole research is to come up with the data to help email marketers to get the most from their email campaign. Follow the timeframes, build your campaign accordingly and keep all the data of what you have sent safely in order to improve your return on investment.