Timing Is Everything: The Best And Worst Times To Send Emails

It doesn’t matter how good your email subject line or how well-thought and well-made your content is. If your timing for an email campaign is off, you will still have low engagement rates. That is why you also need to know when is the best time to send emails campaigns.

You can do this by examining your users’ behaviour and knowing the timezone of their location. By doing so, you’ll be able to send emails that they will surely open because they’re in the mood and at the right time of the day for reading your messages.

Below are some of the useful tips to drive more opens, click-throughs, and conversion rates. Find out more about which hours and what days of the week are the best time to send emails. Know the worst times as well and why you should follow these schedules.

General Advice

1. Morning

9 am – 11 am on Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best hours to send email campaigns. It is because people in business are already done with difficult morning tasks and take their morning breaks as they transition into lunchtime.

It is also advisable to send emails very early in the morning, such as 4 am – 6:30 am during these days because most of your users check their phones first thing after they wake up. 50% of these people are also emailing in their beds during these early hours.

2. Afternoon

For Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, 2 pm – 4 pm is the peak time for sending email campaigns. During these hours, users are looking for distractions from work and are opening their inboxes from both computers and phones, which potentially increases your click and open rates.

3. Evening

8 pm to midnight is the best time to send emails on weekday evenings for increased open rates. You shouldn’t send emails earlier than that because users are still doing their household chores and are eating their dinner.

From 8 pm to midnight, people do nothing besides preparing to sleep in their beds or are in their living rooms watching TV while scrolling through their phones.

4. The Weekend

Email opens are at a peak at 9 pm on Sundays. Just like Tuesdays to Wednesdays, from 8 pm to midnight on Sundays is one of the best times to send the last email campaigns of the week.

Saturdays have high click-to-open and conversion rates, and it is best to send your emails from 11 am to 5 pm. Most users are still sleeping in or are doing their weekend morning leisures before 11 am. Past 5 pm, your customers will be hanging out with friends and families and are off their phones.

Specific Advice

1. Know your audience’s timezone

When new customers join your mailing list, ask them where they live. You can do this by asking your users to input their address when they subscribe to your services. The timezone from Quebec is different from Vancouver’s.

The same goes for New York, San Francisco, and countries all around the world. Sending emails altogether to users living in different timezones will result in lousy campaign timing, which would yield alarming campaign statistics.

When you’ve received your user’s location information, segment these users based on their local addresses so you can send them well-timed emails.

2. Understand their daily schedule

Your users have different careers or aren’t working at all. That’s why you should ask when their working hours are and when their usual free time is during the mailing list subscription process. When your customers have given you their daily schedule, segregate them again based on their free time to send well-timed emails.

3. Analyze your email open rates and optimize based on data

It’s best to ask for your users’ email address only as they join your mailing list. Asking for too much user data will annoy your customers and make them cancel their subscriptions. The worst scenarios of them all – they’ll input the wrong data or report all your emails as spam.

Do the job of analyzing your user’s behaviour by tracking where they’re receiving your emails and what time they’re opening your campaigns based on the location’s timezone. Then, use the analyzed data as your basis for sending well-timed emails.

Also Read: How To Lookup Emails: Easy And Fast

The Worst Days and Times to Send Emails

Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and the weekends are the worst days to send emails. A lot of users aren’t emotionally investing on the first day of the week. User’s only open their inboxes on Mondays to delete emails and free up space.

Wednesday isn’t also ideal for email marketing aside for A/B testing campaigns. During Fridays, users are excited about spending their weekends and are clocking out of work early to go to their favourite destressing places.

On weekends, users don’t want their precious leisure time interrupted by a marketing email. Laptops, computers, and phones use for YouTube, social media, or other things but not for opening emails.

During weekdays, the worst hours to send emails are from 7 am to 9 am for these are commuting and productivity hours. 12 noon to 1 pm isn’t ideal for campaigns because users are eating their lunches and are having their midday naps.

Don’t send emails from 5 pm to 7 pm on weekdays. Everyone is commuting on their way home during these times. When they arrive, they do their chores, spend time with their families, and eat dinner.

The worst times to send emails are from 12 midnight to 5 am. Everyone is asleep. You don’t want to anger your users by waking them up through the notification sound, vibration, or their device’s screen lighting up.

Also Read: How to Manage Business Emails

Conclusion

In conclusion, there are no guaranteed best and worst times to send emails as every user’s schedule and time zone differs from one another. Open, click-through, and conversion rates are also subjective.

It means that engagement rates will also depend on your subject line, content, and design, along with proper campaign timing. It is your best bet to analyze your user’s behaviour data and use appropriate segmentation to send well-timed emails according to their preferences properly.