For many businesses, knowing when to send out an email campaign can be very confusing. The majority of debates center around what day and time is best to send an email campaign, if you Google it you’ll be overwhelmed by conflicting articles and surveys, therefore we decided to let you know what our experience has taught us, so you can make up your own mind.
Which day is best to send an email campaign?
Many sites suggest a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday are good days to send out an email campaign. This seems pretty logical as Monday’s and Friday’s are always manic for most people, Monday being the start of a week, prioritising workloads, Friday, tieing up loose ends and getting ready for the weekend. But the reality is, it depends entirely on your target audience. For example, sending out a business to consumer email may work better early evenings, early mornings or weekends, whereas Business to Business has to be sent out Monday to Friday during office hours.
Our research
Overall Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday afternoons seem to get the best results. Interestingly a few months back we sent out a special offer email to one of our client’s database, they requested it be sent on a Monday morning due to the dates of the offer, the open rate was 36%. A new offer emailed last month to the same database was sent on a Thursday afternoon and received a 42% open rate.
What time is best?
According to Campaign Monitor, who took the data from 192 million campaigns, the most popular time that emails were opened was between 9am – 5pm. However, when comparing the morning (before work) to evening (after work) there appears to be a larger open percentage after 6pm. Again, we believe that the time you send an email campaign should depend on the industry you’re targeting. Office workers tend to clear all their important emails in the morning and ignore marketing emails, they just don’t have time to read unsolicited emails. However, this type of office audience would typically open an email campaign mid-afternoon.
| Hours of the day | Percentage opened |
| Midnight – 8am | 16% |
| 9am-5pm | 53% |
| 1pm | 7% |
| 6pm-11pm | 24% |
Other tips
If it’s a marketing email, keep copy short and to the point, no one will read the fine print. If it’s an offer, make it obvious in the first paragraph. If it’s a newsletter, offer a snippet for each article giving your reader the chance to read more through links. Make sure you include a strong call to action. We have found by simply adding an enquire now button, our click rates have increased by an average of 3 -10%. It’s important to make the most of your subject line, split test them, see what gets the most opens. Subject lines should be short, interesting and capture why your audience should read on, be cautious on your subject line content as some words mean the email is automatically added to spam. Minimise the amount of CAPITALS and Italics used and most importantly put yourself in the recipient’s shoes, what would you like to read, what would capture your attention?