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June 2006 When is the best time to send an email campaign? by Cassie Woolley When is the best day and time to send an email? The answer is simply: “it depends”. It depends on your audience and it depends on your message. It’s 5:30pm on a Friday. I’m making dinner and 4 year old Megan is belting out a hard rock rendition of “Mary had a little lamb”, while teasing her 1 year old brother Reid with some cereal she has stolen from the pantry. Reid is responding with an ear piercing shriek, and suddenly the phone rings. Who could it be? A telemarketer of course! That poor underpaid call centre slave hasn’t got a chance calling me at that time of night. I would have thought that they would have learned by now that dinner time is not a very endearing time to call unsuspecting consumers, yet the calls keep coming. As email marketers we sometimes fall into the trap of believing that since our message will not require immediate attention, we don’t have to worry about when we send it. In fact, I have read that the time and day of delivery can affect response rates by up to 10%. When is the best day and time to send an email? The answer is simply: “it depends”. It depends on your audience and it depends on your message. If you are targeting a business audience, then experts agree that you should be sending between Tuesday and Thursday, and that you will probably have more success in the morning. If you are selling Real Estate and your email contains weekend open houses, you should send on Wednesday or Thursday, so that your subscribers have time to plan their Saturday schedule. If you are targeting consumers, consider the fact that many consumers now spend time on the internet in the evening and on weekends. Studies also show that “click per open” rates are generally higher on the weekend for consumer targeted emails. Ask yourself - “when would my customers be making their purchasing decisions?” Regardless of your audience, I would recommend avoiding delivering email first thing on Monday morning (when your average office worker is sorting through a whole weekend’s worth of emails) and Friday afternoon (when the brain is shutting down in preparation for the weekend). The best way to determine the best day and time to send your email is to do your own testing. Vary the time and day that you send your email campaigns and compare the results. Perhaps you should even be segmenting your subscribers and sending the same campaign to different groups of subscribers at different times. If you are using a tool like MailManager or iRealty, you may also have access to reports that will allow you to analyse the time of day and day of week that your campaigns are being opened and responded to. Take this Time of Day report for example:
The orange bars represent opens, and the green line represents clicks on links in the email. What you are looking for is not only the total number of opens and clicks, but also the number of “clicks per open”. You will notice that there were more opens between 7pm and 8pm, but the ratio of clicks to opens is higher between 8pm and 9pm. A similar graph for the day of week shows that for THIS campaign, the most activity occurred on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Don’t forget to take into account the date and time that your email was sent when analysing your results. Knowing that the above email was sent on a Tuesday at 7pm would probably affect the way you interpret the results. For example, you should not look at these results and assume that Tuesday at 8pm is the best time to get the most opens and clicks. You should test multiple days and times and consider all of the results together. Geography should also be considered. If your subscribers are scattered across the globe then perhaps you should consider staggering your delivery so that each subscriber receives it at the best time in their particular time zone. The map below shows the distribution of a campaign sent to 25,000 people last week.
There is not one clear answer to the question: "When is the best time to send my email campaign?" Your subscribers all have different habits, needs and schedules. It is up to you to test to determine when you get the best response from your subscribers. |
