What’s the best day and time to send email newsletters?
There’s not much point to a newsletter if no one ever reads it. Sending on the wrong day or time can have a major impact on your email campaign performance. Read on to find out how you can increase your campaign open rates by following a few simple rules.
Aside from the obvious questions around how to create the right content, knowing what day and time to send your newsletters is perhaps even more important. In this article we explain how to choose the right time and day of the week to send your email campaigns.
Is timing really important?
While creating an engaging, interesting email marketing campaign with the right subject line and offer is crucial to your campaign’s success, you have to get your clients to actually open the message first. So yes, timing is very important.
Firstly, let’s say your email is about an upcoming event. While a significant proportion of your recipients will open the email on the day that you send it, most of them probably won’t. So if your email newsletter is about a last minute event happening that night or the next day, chances are the event will have come and gone before most recipients even know about it.
The rule of thumb here is to send your email newsletter at least three to four days before the event to ensure it’s seen by as many people as possible.
What’s the best time of day to send an email newsletter?
Early morning sends are to be avoided at all costs as they have by far the lowest open rates. This is because most people check their email when they first get to work, and many will delete anything unimportant to clear out their inbox.
In Australia, for most of the year you don’t need to worry too much about time zones. However, when Daylight Saving is in effect, you’ll need to factor that into your send times. The simplest way around this is to stagger your sends so that everyone receives the email at the same time of day in their local time zone.
Open rates vary from one industry to the next, and even one campaign to the next, but generally speaking the best open rates are in email campaigns sent at about 12-1pm. This makes sense because people tend to relax a little around lunch time and be a bit more casual with reading their emails.
What’s the best day of the week to send an email newsletter?
Mondays are the worst day to send your email campaigns. This one is fairly obvious because, as mentioned above, people tend to clear out their inbox before they start the day. And since they have probably received quite a few emails over the weekend, any mass emails sitting in an inbox should be shaking in their boots (well, if they had any).
Also avoid weekend sends. Most people will manage to get away from their computer for most of the weekend. Just about every statistic will drop off considerably on weekends, so sending then is not a good idea.
Fridays are hit and miss. Some hobby/recreational newsletters perform well because people are looking forward to the weekend, but most business-related emails will be ignored or deleted because people are tired after working the whole week and don’t want to sit and read more emails.
Any midweek day (Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday) will give you the best results in most cases. Combine this with the 12-1pm sends, and all in all you should follow the basic guide of ‘midday, midweek’ for all of your campaigns.
Continue to experiment with send times
Of course, there are always exceptions to the midday, midweek rule so it’s important that you don’t make any assumptions, especially where generating revenue is concerned. Test, test and test again, using different day and time combinations. See which works best for you and focus more on that time.
Remember also that user activities and trends do change over time, so always continue to test even once you’ve found your ideal email send day and time. Keep a record of your send days and times so you can compare the data later on.
If getting more people to open your emails ultimately leads to more customers making a purchase with your company, email newsletter testing will be time well spent.
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