Looking for an answer to the question, “When is the best time to send an email to your current or prospective customers?” Read this post.
These days, marketers can use diverse means to connect with their target audiences. Facebook, Twitter, and the like do this job quite well. Yet, they are still behind another powerful promotional channel — email marketing, which brings businesses the highest return on investment.
The popularity of email marketing has a negative side as well — intense competition. With truckloads of marketing emails bombarding consumers’ inboxes, it becomes extremely difficult to stand out and get a recipient to open your message. This puts the right timing for email blasts to the forefront. In this post, you will find some helpful tips on choosing the best day and time to send emails to your prospects or customers.
Technologically, the present-day world is a far cry from the world we lived in just a couple of decades ago. Mobile devices, social media, and other wonders of technology have greatly simplified marketers’ mission. They can now reach out to the maximum number of consumers in just a few clicks.
However, quantity doesn’t always equal quality. Social media like Facebook are quite effective at engaging the target audience. Yet, they still can’t compare with email marketing in this respect. It has the greatest ROI among all advertising channels and shows no signs of stopping.
According to Statista, the email marketing revenue worldwide is expected to reach $17.9 billion by 2027. This shows how popular this method is among businesses. The sky above email marketing is not completely blue, though. With a tremendous number of messages sent every day, the ones that end up at the bottom of the inbox are likely to be ignored.
All the great, engaging content you prepared for your audience, thus, may turn out to be just a waste of effort. Hence the conclusion: you also need to figure out the best time to send marketing emails. Sending them when your prospects or customers are not thinking about emails at all is a straight path to failure. Sending them at the same time your rivals do means your message will be lost among tens of similar letters.
How can you come up with the best day and time to send an email then? Truth is, there are no set-in-stone rules to this end. Some general guidelines do exist. That said, you should know your audience deeply above all else if you want to succeed. Only armed with this knowledge can you make an informed decision regarding the best email blast timing.
To help you get the ball rolling, here are a few helpful tips.
The Best Times and Days to Send Marketing Emails: Our Tips
#1: Learn Exactly Who Your Audience Is. Message These People on the Days and at the Times They Are Most Likely to Read Your Emails
As we said before, the key to successful email marketing is a deep understanding of your recipients. It’s certainly impossible to know exactly who each of your targets is, but you can create a buyer persona or personas. This is a cumulative character who represents your focus group.
To carry out successful email marketing campaigns effortlessly, using advanced tools can be highly beneficial. One such tool is Virtuous, designed specifically for non-profit organizations. Virtuous is an advanced nonprofit marketing automation tool that ensures you never miss an opportunity to connect with your audience in real-time. This tool not only aides in multi-channel workflows but helps in creating dynamic donor journeys. Such journeys allow every donor to feel a deep connection to your cause while providing the team with real-time data for the best next action.
How can you come up with it? It’s common sense, really. Consider the following aspects:
- The type of your business. Is this B2C or B2B?
- The industry or business sector your recipients work in.
- The usual daily routine your audience follows: do they have a standard nine-to-five job or irregular working hours? What do they do every weekday and on weekends?
- The age group that the majority of your targets belong to.
- The time zone and climate your audience resides in.
Write down the answers to these questions and you will have a better image of the people you want to engage with. Based on these aspects, we can suggest the following best days and times to send an email blast.
B2B Vs B2C
People tend to separate their personal emails from those they receive at work. That’s why sending messages to your B2B audience on Saturdays or Sundays is not a good idea. After all, this is a period for rest and relaxation.
Send your emails to the employees of a B2B company on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays at approximately 10am–11am. That’s the time when most of them sit down at their desktop computers and start checking their messages.
Another suitable time we recommend is around 1pm–2pm on the days we listed above. This is when employees are likely to sift through their emails at leisure during their lunch respites. Also, the time between 6pm and 7pm in the middle of the week is worth giving a shot. Employees coming back home by public transport may wish to kill their time by looking at their emails.
The best time to send a B2B email to managers and supervisors, however, is Saturday around 10am. The reason? They have more responsibility and, thus, check their inbox more often to stay abreast of the latest developments. On Saturdays, they tend to be less busy than during the week.
The B2C audience is a different matter. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact day and time when consumers will want to open marketing emails. Therefore, you can try your luck and send your email blast on weekends, say late on Saturday (around 12am). This is the time when competition is the lowest. Thus your chance to attract a prospect’s or customer’s attention to your email is higher.
Industry
One day that most marketers strive to avoid sending emails on is Friday, and for a good reason. Do you usually read emails on Fridays? If you’re like us, we assume you don’t. That’s because Friday is the last day of the working week. You’re definitely looking forward to Saturday and Sunday in the company of your family or friends or alone unwinding and enjoying yourself.
Reading emails is probably the last thing you would want to do when the clock is about to strike 5, unless… Unless you’re looking for some ways to spend this evening and the rest of the weekend in a more festive way. For instance, you might want to go to a concert or have a luxury dinner in a downtown restaurant.
This is when you can be searching for relevant information on the Internet and see a new message drop into your inbox. The chances are you would like to have a look at it.
Hence the conclusion. In a standard business setting, Friday is not the best time to send an email newsletter. However, in an industry where people might want to check their mailbox on this day (show business, restaurant business, etc.), Friday or weekends can be a valid option. Just experiment to see if this works in your case.
Age
You should also consider the average age of your target audience when deciding on the best time to send out emails. If these are young people, you might want to break away from the typical pattern of sending emails in the middle of the week and day. That’s because they tend to do everything on their mobile devices and heed push notifications. There’s nothing wrong with sending them an email late in the day, when competition is negligible.
Time Zone and Climatic Conditions
Consumers who reside in places with a hot climate behave differently from those who live in countries like Finland with harsh climatic conditions. Consider this as well.
Are your targets located in areas with high temperatures? Then a late evening or weekend is probably not the best time to send sales emails or other types of business messages. The reason should be obvious. That’s the time when the sun goes down. People can finally breathe in some fresh air outdoors and have fun.
On the other hand, someone from a country with a colder climate is likely to stay indoors on weekends more often. They might want to surf the Internet on these days and are more likely to take notice of your message.
The time zone where the majority of your targets live matters too. Send a letter to a New Yorker and a Parisian keeping in mind the difference in time between these cities. Otherwise, your email may end up buried under a ton of other messages.
#2: An Emailless Beginning Makes a Good Ending: Approach the First Day of the Week with Caution
Friday is not the best day to send emails. Still, you can score some points with it if you do some homework. Monday, in turn, is the worst loser among all weekdays as far as email marketing goes. Some experts claim that Monday has the lowest level of competition, meaning your email does have a chance to be noticed after all.
Let us be honest, though. The start of a week is the most challenging period for every white-collar worker. The Sunday barbecue was delicious, but the next is a week away. The thought of spending another five days at the office desk seems intolerable.
What do most employees do with incoming emails on Mondays? They just tick the Select All checkbox and press the Delete button to wipe their inbox clean. The bottom line: ignore Mondays. You can experiment with them, but this will hardly bring you any tangible outcome. Mondays are definitely not the best time to send an email campaign.
#3: Сhristmas Sale? A Product Launch Party? The Best Time to Send an Email with an Event Announcement Is Around a Week in Advance
If you’re planning to organize an event, send your email at least three to five days before it takes place. This way you will cover the audience who may not read your message at once (only slightly above 20% of all email opens occur in a one-hour span after receiving a message).
#4: Make Use of Specialized Email Marketing Software to See How Your Emails Perform
Choosing only one specific day and time for sending emails to your target audience is not enough. While following the guidelines in this post, pick several days and times and run split tests to see which of them bring you more opens or click-throughs.
To aid you in your efforts, use one of the numerous email marketing automation tools, such as SendGrid, HubSpot, MailChimp, or others. To learn about key features of good email marketing automation software, read this post.
Summing Up
Choosing the best day and time to send your marketing emails is not easy. In general, experts recommend Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays at 10am–11am, 1pm–2pm, and 6pm–7pm as the most effective options.
That being said, you should know your target audience’s habits, daily routines, and demographics to pick an optimal day and time for email blasts. You should also split-test different times and days to find out if you’ve made the correct choice.
Timing is a crucial aspect of every email marketing campaign. There’s no doubt about that. However, once a lead or customer has opened your message, you expect them to click through to your offer, right? That’s when engaging and visually attractive content comes into play.
If you need a beautiful email template tested in all major browsers and email clients that integrates immaculately with the leading email marketing service providers, such as CampaignMonitor, we are at your service.
The GetDevDone email template & banner development team has a wide experience crafting email templates for businesses from almost all industries. We use cutting-edge technologies to build responsive, mobile-friendly, and retina-ready templates that can also include animated GIFs on your request.
Let us work together towards increasing your conversion rate. Write to us. We’re just a click away.
You might also find these posts interesting:
Dark Mode Adjustment for HTML Emails in Mail on macOS Mojave: A Quick Solution
8 Essential Characteristics of an Email Marketing Service for Your Business Promotion
Email Marketing During the Crisis: Tips and Tools to Help Your Business Keep Afloat
Why Your Prospects or Customers May Not Want to Open or Read Your Marketing Emails: 4 Reasons
The Top 5 Email Service Providers (Based on Specific Criteria)
Shaping an Effective Email Marketing Strategy for Small Business: 7 Key Guidelines