I have to disappoint you. There is no silver bullet answer to this problem: perfect time and day for sending promotional emails vary drastically depending on your demographics, geography, email list sources etc.
That said, not all is lost – there are ways and stats available to help us get closer to the perfect sending time. Let’s dig into them.
4 Important Points to Take Into Consideration when Picking Your Email Sending Time and Day
Picking the right day and time is critical to success of your email campaigns. Some days are particularly busy (Monday for example) and some times are really just inconvenient for most of your potential customers (daily rush hour time for example).
A few things you need to take into consideration when thinking about your perfect email sending time:
- Who are your customers and when do they normally read emails: you probably already know your customers best. Potentially try running a survey or observe your historical email data.
- What do your customers normally do in the time-frame of two hours after your email sending time: vast majority of all emails are read in the first 4 hours after delivery. Consider this whole time frame instead of focusing on a particular time of day.
- When do your target customers make most of their online purchases: don’t simply focus on the open rates; try to optimize for the revenue. Check your best times and days based on revenue from your normal web analytics and see if you can combine this data with other signals to nail the perfect email timing.
- When do other e-commerce managers send their email campaigns: look at the benchmark stats below, try to avoid the email sending volume peaks and always experiment with different sending times.
Let’s look into some of the stats and tips that should help you get closer to your optimal sending time.
Sending day: Wednesday, Thursday… maybe even weekends
Even though, historically, marketers have been thought and advised that the best days to send out emails are Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, you shouldn’t take that for granted. When I looked at the statistics from various email service providers, they seem to vary quite a lot.
For example, independent researches by GetResponse and MailChimp both point to similar conclusions: best performing day of the week is Thursday and you should send your emails between 2-4PM on that day.
Be careful when making quick assumptions from the charts below: MailChimp’s data seems not to be adjusted by volume of emails sent out at particular time (they also acknowledge that the volume of emails is biggest on during the weekdays). Naturally, Thursdays then consequently see the highest number of opens.