When to send Marketing Emails?

Time of day: The top engagement times for email as I have experienced are as follows: in the morning, 8 AM to 9 AM both for opens and click-through rates (CTR); and in the afternoon, 3 PM to 8 PM for opens, and 3 PM and 4 PM for CTR. However, just as knowing the daily routines of your audience can help you estimate the best time of day to send, knowing their weekly and monthly routines can be very useful too. Now, know this, you’ll want to try and break down your email lists into time-zones (or States) in order to have the greatest chance of success.

What Days: Monday’s results are the lowest except for weekends, my experience is that it indicates that people are busy getting up-to-speed from the weekend and planning out the rest of the week. Thursday’s seem to be the peak in open rates and CTR — My stats show that this is when people browse their inbox with more engagement – the week is almost over, most of their work is done and their thinking/planning the weekend. I see a slight fall-off on Friday may be because the weekend is right around the corner, and they want to get everything tidied up so they can watch the clock after lunch – that said – Friday afternoons (3pm – 5pm) seem to be the best.

Events: The first thing remember is that, while a large portion of recipients are going to open your email the day that they receive it, but not all of them will. I see people visit their inboxes less frequently during the day and instead hit their social networks, the number of days it takes between sending an email and a user reading it has grown. It used to be a commonly accepted that a marketing email or newsletters had a three day "open tail". These days, most people allow up to five days for stragglers. This is important to you if you send emails that relate to specific events. Sending the email the day of the event means that, by the time a significant portion of your audience reads the email, the event will be over. a minimum, send your email three days before the target event. If you want to be extra safe, increase that to five days and if your event requires travel, time off work – you’ll want to have a 90/60/30/7 day plan.

This information is based on what I know from my 20 years of experience, other informational resources and stats available on the net – this would be a good starting point for anyone wanting thinking about mass email marketing .