If your email is sent when most of your audience is rushing to work, your message may get lost in the pile of junk that won't be opened. Don't lose your market.
This is historically a dream for all marketers. No doubt, email is the best way to connect with your audience, but the million dollar question is: what is the best time of day to send mail
Just like social media posts like best to post on Instagram, Yes there is the best time to send mail too.
Time Matters in Email Marketing - Why?
Did you know that if you want your marketing emails to have the impact they want, you have to send them at the right time?
Let's start by saying that there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to the best time to send an email. It's just the best time for your audience. Each email is targeted at different types of people with different online habits.
In short, the best time to send an email for your business may not be the same as the best time for another marketer or brand.
People often receive a lot of emails in their inbox every day. With so much going on in the office, only 65% of incoming emails will be resolved by itself, and the rest will end up in the trash or unopened.
Market research has shown that after 24 hours of arriving in the inbox, the open rate for the email drops to around 1%.
This means that if your subscribers don't open your emails on the first day they receive them, they are unlikely to read them in the future.
And that doesn't include emails that are deleted by their email service provider's spam filters.
It's also worth learning more about average email open rates and getting other tips to improve your email marketing performance.
With many competitors in the market and the inbox is filled with many marketing emails, the marketer should send emails at the right time of the day/week where the recipients can open them and read them.
What Is the Best Time To Send Emails?
A single standard time for sending your emails would be super convenient, but, unfortunately, it doesn’t exist. The internet is abundant with research on email timing, so we'll share what we've learned, but it's important you do your own research!
According to Validity’s State of Email 2022 report, the best time frame for sending emails is around 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. during the last three-quarters of an hour.
The three best days to send emails are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
We broke down its findings regarding the best time to send an email by timings:
- 8am email had the highest open rate of 20.32% and the highest click-through rate of 7.79%.
- 10 emails also had higher open rates, but fewer orders were generated than at other times.
- 1pm d hasn't come out on top in any metric, but it's done well. It can be a great time to send an email.
- 4pm had the highest process rates.
- 5pm emails have a higher click-through rate.
Also we broke down the email timing according to the industry -
- For Ecommerce: 10am
- If you are a SAAS Platform: 2pm-3pm
- Marketing Agencies: 4pm
- Hospitality/Online Retail: 8am-10am
- B2B Marketers: 8am-10am
NGOs: 3pm-4pm
Of course, please keep in mind... Sticking to one-size-fits-all timing would mean potentially sacrificing subscribers for simplification. This can only be justified if you send emails manually – and we hope you don’t – and therefore do not have the capacity to hit different timings for different segments of recipients.
If, however, you have your email outreach automated – and also have some data collection software in place – then you can research the best timing for each category of your subscribers without relying on dubious data from the web.
How to Calculate Your Best Email Send Time
To understand when, whom, and at what frequency to send emails, do the following:
1. Research your audience
Knowing your customers is essentially knowing your business. In-depth audience research – demographics, psychographics, location, occupation, budget, preferences, problems and pains, purchase history, etc. – will help you understand who you are emailing, what they like, and how they may respond to a particular email sent at a particular time.
Night hours may seem the worst for marketing – because everyone is asleep, of course – but not if you sell sleeping pills to someone wide awake. Insomnia sufferers may find your proposition especially valuable as it was sent at the time of utmost need and offers an adequate solution.
2. Test email timing fundamentals
As uniquely specific as email timing is, there are still fundamentals worth testing. Some of these may work for you, be it as is or with slight adjustments:
- Send business emails at the start of the business day. Most people are already at work at 10 a.m. – for many, checking their inbox is part of their early day routine.
- Send holiday emails on weekends. Weekends are the least congested time of the week, which may work to your advantage among particular audiences. Announcing sales or special events on Fridays and Sundays may help you stand apart from the competition and attune your subscribers to shopping. Remember, people get way fewer emails on weekends.
- Send fewer emails to older audiences. Time flies for all of us, but especially so for the older generation. Time speeds up as we age, which is why it may be reasonable not to bombard older subscribers with frequent emails.
- Do not send emails during the first 15 minutes of an hour. More and more businesses use email automation, setting the send time for sharp hours (for example, 10 a.m.). Switch it to 10.25, and you will separate yourself from the flood of emails hitting the inbox at the beginning of an hour.
At the end of the day, though, the best you can do is simply ask your customers when they want to receive your emails. Not all of them will respond, but even 10% will be enough to get a glimpse into when it may be best to message your subscribers.
But then again, all the research and testing should be automated as long as you deal with more than a few subscribers. Platforms like Phonexa allow for:
- Multi-channel email distribution: measuring the deliverability of your email channel by comparing the inbox data for several campaigns.
- Behavioral segmentation: customizing your emails based on the customer data and how customers respond to your emails.
- A/B email testing: creating split tests to see what emails work best for what recipients.
- Top-notch email hygiene: cleaning up the subscriber list and engaging subscribers based on chosen criteria (location, past activity, gender, etc.).
Not only will high-quality email automation software improve your deliverability and customization, but it will help you establish a steady stream of high-intent leads that will likely convert and grow your bottom line, granting you up to 3.2 times more revenue.
How to Increase Email Opens
Delivering your email to an inbox is only half the job – the other half is to entice the recipient to open it and perform the target action. Even 100% deliverability doesn’t matter if your leads cease to buy from you.
Here is the bulletproof algorithm for clicks and conversions:
- Start with a mouth-watering subject line. The subject line renders the first impression, either moving the recipient forward to your email or repelling them. A short – no longer than 40 characters to ensure visibility on mobile – clear, instructive, and curiosity-arousing subject line is best to make the subscriber feel the value of your message and proceed with your email. Check out our favorite subject lines here.
- Continue with visuals. We process images 60,000 times faster and remember visuals much better than text, and you can appeal to that with relevant visual content. For the best results, make sure to brand your visuals to connect the viewer to your brand image while pushing them toward the target action. This is why video emails are especially powerful for driving engagement and conversions. Check out Sendspark - the #1 platform to create and share video emails.
- Use AMP emails. They allow in-email purchases and real-time content updates (for example, the number of available seats on a flight), and can help you gain more engagement and ultimately draw more sales.
- End with a strong call to action. The ever-decreasing human attention span necessitates simple, unambiguous, and personalized CTAs in the most visible place of your email (or near the place where the most value is provided).
Why Email Matters For Your Business
In our research, we found that 85.4% of marketers use automation as part of their email marketing strategy. So if you're not using email marketing automation, maybe your competitors are.
Automated email marketing allows you to improve sales conversions - perhaps even 14%. It's a way to send customers unique offers - like product sales or newsletter updates - and information your reader can't get anywhere else.
Emails should be tailored to what your customers want to see, allowing you to speak directly to them. Your emails should contain information that your customers want to learn more about, such as discount offers, business updates, or product or service launches.
Final Thoughts on Email Timing
Now that we have analyzed data from various sources to determine the best time and day to send emails, we know that it depends on your target audience and the activity you want to promote.
Be sure to try one or two options and find the time and day that works best for your business. Once you've launched your campaign, you can also find out what open rates are good for emails to measure campaign performance.
Above all, though, focus on the value of your content. Make sure every email is relevant to the current needs and wants of the recipient, and outshines the competition in at least one area (relevance, price, timing, etc.).
Whether you reinforce the message with FOMO, loss aversion, reciprocity, or other triggers, make sure your value proposition is the focal point of the message.
