Get the most out of your emails by sending them at the right time
Did you know that 59% of people say marketing emails influence their purchasing decisions, and half of those people buy from marketing emails at least once a month?
That means if you get their attention with your marketing email, you have a good chance of landing a sale.
Sending your emails at the right time is essential. Imagine your email is sent out at 2am on Saturday. Nobody is going to read it as they’ll all be too busy enjoying the weekend.
By the time they look at their emails again, your email would have been shoved to the back by other emails received over the weekend. Your email is destined to be moved to an archive folder without being read or, worse, deleted.
We felt it was important to have a look at when is the best time to send a marketing email. And what is best than to look at what most brands are doing. If everyone is doing it, it’s got to be best practice, right?
We looked at marketing emails sent by 500 Australian retail brands over a period of 4 months to see when is the best day and time to send an email and here is what we found.
Best days to send emails
- Monday is the worst day to send emails. People are busy planning their week. They would be going through all the emails they missed from the weekend and your email would be sitting at the back of that queue.
- Tuesday and Thursday are the best days, with Wednesday close behind. People are settled in for the week week. Emails from the weekend are cleared, and now it’s time to see if anything new came in.
- Friday and Saturday are not too good. The weekend is here, and people would be too busy out & about and enjoying the weekend.
- Sunday is also a good day. When people start their week on Monday, your email will among the first to be noticed.
Best time to send emails
We found the best time to send marketing emails is during the first half of the day, from 6am to 12pm. People would be looking at emails while commuting to work or while having lunch.
Activity starts to slow down from 1pm onwards. It picks up again at 5pm when everybody finishes work and has time to look at their emails again on their way home.
Best day and time to send emails
If you’re looking for a sweet spot between day and time, we got you covered. The chart is a bit busy, but here’s the gist of it.
- Surprisingly Sunday morning has the most activity compared to other days. It peaks between 8 – 9 am. Saturday morning is pretty busy too.
- Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday seem to have their peaks at around 5pm. Still, their mornings are also pretty busy, especially around 7 – 9am.
- Monday is quieter in the morning and starts to pick up around 5 and 6pm.
Wrapping Up
And that’s a wrap on when to send marketing emails. Our findings are consistent with many research by digital marketing agencies, which tells us at the end of the day, we’re dealing with humans just like you and me. We all have our work-life balance; we have weekends, we commute to work, and we have downtime looking at our phones during lunch.
Whatever day or time you choose to send emails to your customers, look at your user base and put yourself in their shoes; when do you think they would like to receive communication from your brand?