When should I send my emails? (Best timing for Email Marketing Campaigns)

Nov 1, 2013

It is a basic principle of email marketing that the marketing emails you send out to your email list should always be designed to achieve the best possible response from their recipients. If you are serious about encouraging people to open your emails then you are probably already spending time thinking about things like the content of your emails, the tone the email strikes with the reader, whether the email should be serious or funny etc.

It is likely that you have looked into design of your emails and tried to analyse which of your emails produce the best response, and whether you can reproduce that response with all your emails.

But, are you thinking of Best time to send emails?

When are your emails read?

One area to which you may not have given that much thought is the ideal time to send out your emails. Figures show that only around half of all companies actually know the time at which their emails will get the best response.

Studies show that an email is most likely to be opened and acted upon if it is found in the inbox within one hour of it being sent. That is the easy part of the equation. The problem for the people sending the email is to work out when most of their list will be online to read your marketing email.

• Email to business would work best in the morning or late in the evening.
• For consumers it would work best around 7-9 PM.

How much response is worth it?

This is an important question. It has been shown that most people have regular schedules for when they are online each day. Since everyone on your mailing list probably got there by signing up on your website you can in theory work out what time of day they were online to sign up, and therefore when they are most likely to be online in the future to receive your emails. This technique has been shown to increase open rates of emails by up to 20%.

The problem with that approach is that everyone on your list probably signed up at a different time of day, so in order to achieve this higher open rate you are going to have to send out lots of individually timed emails to your customers. Depending on what you are selling, and the value of each customer to you it may be worth the extra effort and expense to do this but in most cases this is just too much effort.

When is the best time for sending Emails?

This is a difficult question to answer. There is going to be some variation depending on the type of person on your mailing list. If you are targeting businesses then it makes sense to avoid mailing them on the weekend or outside of standard business hours.

Studies show that most people check their email soon after arriving in the office in the morning, and then again in the early afternoon. The rate of email opening declines the longer the email remains in the inbox. In one study the open rate for emails started off at about 26% but after 4 hours only around 5% of the emails remaining were ever opened at all. With these figures in mind it seems sensible to target your emails to arrive just before most people arrive in the office. In this way they will arrive at work, switch on their computers, and immediately find a message from you freshly arrived at the top of the the list of emails. As the email is so new it will appear urgent to them and therefore much more likely to be opened and read.

Facts and Stats about Email Marketing :

• Promotion emails to consumers are best sent between 7pm and 10pm (local timing).
  
• Promotion emails (winters/summers offer) are best sent between 5pm and 7pm. 
  
• Best time to send emails related to real estate and financial services are generally opened between 3pm and 5pm.
  
• Most spam complaints happen between 7 AM to 11 AM everyday.
• Email open rates and click rates are highest in the early morning during all days of the week, with the weekend being the highest.
  
• The optimal email sending frequency is generally 1 to 4 emails a month to a particular database.

Check this Info-graphics out to know more :