Imagine a case:
You make a superb marketing email, following all the best practices of email marketing.
And then you send it to your email list on a Saturday night when everybody is busy partying.
What would be the probable result..???
For sure sending at such times will give you lowest open rates. And mark the failure of your email campaign.
Sending marketing or promotional emails at wrong times is like serving hot soups in summers. Would people like it, noooooo…!!!
Now an obvious question: What is the best day and time to send a marketing email?
Well, if you are searching for a generalized answer then I’m sorry there isn’t one. Every sector has a different audience and their days and times of activity and inactivity are different too. So generalizing them may not work for you.
Don’t we have a solution then..???
Yes, for sure there is a solution..!!
But before we reach there, we need to first understand what the majority of people believe about best days and times of sending emails. We’ll begin with the days first..
The Day Dilemma…
Mondays: The most common prohibition call for sending emails was once used to be on Mondays. But gone are the days, Mondays are trending now.
The Experian study tells that Mondays gave highest open rates of about 19% in the fourth quarter of 2022.
Weekdays: Weekdays are supposed to be the best days to send an email since open rates for these days are quite high and are constant since long. People still prefer to send emails on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
But the same could be a problem for you, as you will have to face a tough competition to stand out in the crowd of millions of emails.
Weekends: Earlier, weekends were avoided to send emails as people were believed to be out of offices and away from their desktops. But mobiles phones and iPad’s have changed this theory.
Now weekends too enjoy email open rates as high as 16% to 20%. This opens a path to explore new times for sending emails.
The Time Dilemma…
Till now the best times to send emails were supposed to be morning 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. or in the afternoon as mentioned by some reports of email marketing services like MailerMailer, GetResponse, and MailChimp. Also, the late evening rates too were considerable.
But the same Experian report gave surprising results on email sending times. According to it, highest open rates of 26% to 35% are in early morning 4 a.m. to afternoon 12 p.m.
I hope by now you’ve understood that you can’t have the same formula to be applicable for everyone. We have to think particularly about a business and derive its very own best day and time of sending emails.
Here is the Solution I was talking about…
To find the solution, we’ll have to twist the question a bit, the new one should be like – What is your best day and time of sending marketing emails?
When you personalize the question, a smart feature of A/B testing comes in the picture. It is a smart tool which has multiple applications and also works great for deciding best times to send emails.
For finding best send times in your case, you can pick three or four day and time combinations based on your previous open rate records. And then can send a group of people emails at those selected times.
Now based on the results you get, you can decide your own best day and time for sending emails.
I would suggest you one more thing, do tweak your send times every once in a while as we never know when our own trends get changed.
How I Found My Best Times…Best Times To Send Emails
I too had the same challenge in MailGet – Email Marketing Platform …How to get the maximum email open rates..???
To crack this challenge, I tried A/B testing and chose three days – Monday, Wednesday, and Sunday with appropriate timings based on my past experiences. I didn’t choose Friday as I knew it won’t help and left Saturday for obvious reasons.
Now I designed a fabulous promotional email and sent it to 1000 different subscribers on these days.
I checked my responses and inferred that Thursday between 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. was the most value returning slot for my product.
And when I tried sending emails at above mentioned times, my email open rates increased from 13.6% to 21.3%. And believe me, that is a huge rise.
Since then I’m following the same schedule with slight tweaks and getting fruitful results from it.
Knocking at the right time alone won’t help…
Getting good open rates doesn’t solely depends on when you’re sending emails. A lot more factors also contribute in communicating well with the subscriber.
Considering the below-mentioned practices could improve your open rates surprisingly to newer levels.
- By selecting the right email marketing services you could make half your work done. A service that gives you high inbox delivery, sends in time, suits your budget, is user-friendly and has least bounces and spam is supposed to be an ideal email marketing service. Make sure you have one.
- The emails should have eyeball-grabbing subject lines. A good subject line is the key to high email opens, therefore you should be on your toes for writing email subject line that works.
- Sending good welcome emails is an excellent practice. Welcome emails have maximum open rates so we can tell our subscribers everything we want to and can set their expectations right there.
- Subscribers should receive emails consistently and the schedule should be fixed in the welcome email itself.
- Last and the most important, you should sound useful to subscribers in your emails. Helping them would help you in return and you will enjoy a long lasting successful relationship with them.
What are your views regarding this?
Do express in the comment box, on anything we could add or delete. See yaa with more of email marketing soon…
