This is a question that comes up all the time “what is the best day to send out my email marketing”, if you google the question, you’ll see that numerous sources will say….shortly after lunch on a Tuesday or a Wednesday are the best times to send out your email marketing. Some are more specific than that, they say 2 pm is the optimum time on these days.
Is it really that simple though? - does the Tuesday/Wednesday rule apply in all cases?
The first area to address is where does the Tuesday/Wednesday theory come from?
Well, back in the early days of email marketing, we are worked in offices and we checked out emails on our trusty old tower pc’s whilst we were rooted to the desk all day. This was in the days before mobile phones were being used anything other than making phone calls and playing Tetris.
So, as we all followed the same work patterns, it was easy to observe tends in email stats. With the advent of faster mobile networks and broadband, this meant that we could view emails on mobiles & tablets and we could do this from home - often outside of working hours.
This really turned everything on it’s head in terms of looking for trends to establish the best time to send out your email marketing.
So whilst the old Tuesday / Wednesday rule used to apply - it certainly doesn’t now. So, in this video, we are going to take a look at how you can work out the best time to send out your email marketing.
The first place to look at is what is it that you are selling and is there an obvious time when your target audience may be more receptive to.
Is your company selling business or leisure products or services?
If your company is selling a service or product that is purely business-related - for example, if you sell I.T equipment, then these mailers will perform better during business hours. Often a slot that works well is mid-morning on a Tuesday. The logic for this is that Mondays are always hectic, lots of emails to clear and typically meeting and or planning the week’s schedule.
Tuesday mid-morning works well as it avoids Monday - and the traditionally busy email time of after lunch. By mid morning on Tuesday, we are all starting to catch up a bit - and have cleared down the inbox of the morning’s emails.
The advent of mobile has had rather an interesting effect on optimum times - we now often get a head start on the Monday morning madness by attending to emails and tidying up the inbox on a Sunday evening. So it’s well worthwhile giving this send time a try - the other bonus is that hardly anybody else is sending their email marketing at this time also - so inbox competition is slim.
Is your company selling leisure products or services?
If you are selling products or services that are geared towards leisure time activities, then these typically receive the best results when sent outside of working hours. A great time window for these is between 8-10 pm, after 8pm, we’ve typically settled down for the evening and are more receptive to a little bit of sofa shopping.
Another slot that really works well is over the lunchtime window of 12pm - 2pm Monday to Friday. During this time, for those of us in the office, we normally take a break for lunch and a quick peruse of the internet. So sending leisure time emails works really well during this time slot.
Is your company in the food & beverage industry?
This is an interesting one - there are several slots that are deemed the ‘golden hour’ in terms of email marketing. The big one is Friday afternoon around 5pm. By this time we are all looking forward to the weekend and are very susceptible to putting the pork chops back in the freezer for another time and order ordering a takeaway instead.
Early lunchtime slots are also great for sending out your email marketing, we are much more likely to make evening dinner reservations before we’ve eaten lunch.
So, what we’ve gathered so far is that there isn’t really a set time for everybody that is the best time to send - there are some business sectors where there are obvious times for getting better results, but really for the rest of us, it’s not that simple.
The rule of thumb here is don’t be influenced by old data from the internet - try it your self and don’t be afraid to think outside the box in terms of send times.
How to compare send time results
Our advice is to try different send times here. The good news is that if you are an email blaster user, then we make this process really easy with ‘A/B testing’. This is an app available to use inside email blaster.
With this app, you can set two or more different send times - the software will select a small test sample of your database and send your campaigns to this data segment at your desired test send times.
The software will then automatically measure the results on a metric that you specify - for example, how many people opened the email.
The software will then automatically send the main campaign at the next available winning time based on the previous results.
Summary
So, it’s really worth trying different send times and seeing what work the best for your business. Times that work well for you will, more than likely not adhere to any times as published by internet experts.
Don’t be afraid to try some left-field send times - you never know, you might be surprised!