What is the best time to send an email?
Pinpointing the best day and time to send a campaign is difficult because ideal sending times vary between industries and lists, and may also depend on the segment of a list you’re sending to.
I recently came across a helpful blog from Mail Chimp. They send around 50 million emails every day, so they have got a LOT of data for a strong analysis. Mail Chimp scanned over a billion emails to identify general trends. Here are a few of their observations and some suggestions:
- More people open email during the day than at night. You may find that changing the time that you send your emails will change your percentage of opens.
- More emails are sent during the week than on weekends, with Tuesday and Thursday being the highest volume days. Changing which day you send your emails may improve your open and click rates
- More links lead to more clicks. Placing a particular link in your content more than once may increase the number of clicks for that link.
The general trends are a starting point, but your list may perform better by going against some or all of those trends. There are some ways you can test and evaluate your specific date to identify specific trends for your list(s) to find your best sending time:
- Use A/B split campaigns to test delivery dates and times. This can be done for an entire list, or you could break it down further and test for segments of your list.
- For daily senders, Mail Chimp have additional tips to help increase your deliverability and engagement such as offering your subscribers the option to sign up for weekly or monthly emails to control how often they receive information from you. Use groups to add this option to your sign up form and you can send to each segment separately.
Tom Kelly-Lord