When is the Best Time to Send Email Newsletters? Email Marketing for SaaS Companies.

The time you send your email newsletters plays a massive factor in the overall performance of your email marketing. The last thing you would want is to send an email newsletter while your customers are busy with work activities or preoccupied with weekend plans. Of course, you'd want your customers to read your emails at a time that fits their schedule.

But how do you decide the best time to send email newsletters? Many factors affect the time you send your email newsletters. You must consider the most important factors if you want to obtain improved open and click-through rates.

Numerous studies have been conducted with varying results. In this article, we'll review the results from several studies, providing you with insight into the best time to send email newsletters. You will also learn tips that will help you choose the best time to send an email.

Before we begin, why does timing matter for email marketing?

Table of Contents

Why Does Timing Matter for Email Marketing?
What is the Best Day to Send Emails?
The Worst Days of the Week to Send Emails.
What is the Best Time to Send Emails?
Conduct A/B Split Test on Your Email Newsletters.
Things to Consider When Choosing the Time to Send Email Newsletters.
How to Choose the Best Time to Send Emails.
Wrapping Up

Why Does Timing Matter for Email Marketing?

They say timing is everything, and you can say the same for your email newsletters. It'll be a total disappointment to put in time and effort in creating a persuasive copy, compelling headline, and Call To Action only to be ignored by your contacts.

The truth is that when you send out emails to your contacts, a lot could happen at that moment. People often receive several emails in their inboxes. They give the emails at the top more priority, so timing is crucial for sending emails.

Choosing the right timing for email marketing ensures:

Improved open rates: an improved open rate increases the chances of better click-through rates. So, if your contacts can get to open your emails at the right time, you're one step closer to hitting your conversion goals.
Improved click-through rate: an improved open rate is not the ultimate result of your email marketing effort. If you send your email at the wrong time, there are chances that your contacts could open your email and still not read through, which would significantly affect your conversion targets.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to the timing for email marketing. What works for one business may not work for you. The key is understanding your target audience when they are most likely to read your emails -

This is one of the first steps to figuring out the perfect time to send emails.

What is the Best Day to Send Emails?

This is a commonly asked question among email marketers. According to research, some days deliver better results than others. However, your particular industry is a huge factor in your email sending schedule.

Below, you will find the best day to send emails and receive them well from customers.

1. Tuesdays and Thursdays:

Data has revealed that Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best days to send emails. According to research from Getresponse, Tuesday has the highest open rate and click-through rate, making it the most common day to send an email.

2. Wednesdays:

Wednesday is also a good day to send emails. Emails are well received on Wednesdays with an improved open and click-through rate.

Data from various research studies

According to compiled research from Coschedule:

Research from Mailchimp found that Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best days to send email.

Source

HubSpot suggests that Tuesdays are the best time to send emails, followed by Monday and Wednesday.

Source

What are the Worst Days of the Week to Send Emails?

1. Mondays: Monday is the first day of the workweek. People prioritize organizing their work activities during Mondays. Even the emails they are most likely to read are business-related, not promotional ones.

Besides, people are usually just recovering from the weekend. So they definitely won't be in the right mood to open an email. So it's best to avoid Mondays.

2. Fridays: Friday is usually the end of the workweek for most people. So you can expect people to be in a rush to get out of work mode and prepare for the weekend. At this point, reading an email would certainly not be top of their priority list.

3. Saturdays - Sundays: Weekends are not ideal for sending emails. People usually spend the weekends doing personal and family activities. So, they are most likely to skip their inboxes, hence reducing email open and click-through rates.

Even more, studies have shown that weekdays produce higher email open rates than the weekends. So it's best to bear these days in mind before sending out email newsletters.

What is the Best Time to Send Emails?

When it comes to email marketing, the time you send your emails can make or break your marketing campaign. If your email arrives at your customer’s inbox at the right time, it opens the door to many opportunities. On the other hand, an email that arrives at your customer’s inbox at the wrong time could result in a reduction in your customer’s engagement rate.

So, how do you figure out the best time to send emails? Before you begin sending out emails, you need to answer the following questions that will help determine your email marketing success:

Target Audience:

What kind of people are you sending emails to?
What does their day-to-day activity look like? It's also important to consider their industry.
Are they a B2B or B2C audience? The truth is that B2B audiences tend to have different work schedules from B2C audiences. So it would be best if you weighed this factor.
What are the problems keeping them up at night?
How can your product or service help solve these problems?

When you understand your target audience very well, you have a better chance of sending your emails at the time that they'll be most likely to read and engage with it.

2. Your Content Type:

The type of content you send also makes a difference in the time your customers read your emails. Promotional emails, educational emails, or transactional emails all have different times that customers view them.

3. Time Zones:

Your customers may have different time zones, so you need to consider this factor before sending out emails. When you use an email automation platform, you can use a location feature that will enable sending emails according to the time zones of your recipients, which will prevent your email newsletter from hitting your recipient's inbox at 2 am.

Here's what research has to say about the best time to send an email:

According to Wordstream, the best time to send emails is Thursday 8–9 am. This time has brought in an open rate of over 25%.
Data from Getresponse indicates that the best time for open rates is 4 am (global). While the best time for clickthrough rates is 6 am.

Source

Campaign monitor’s research indicates that the best time to send emails is between 9-11 AM. However, the peak hour is 10 AM. In summary, over half of all emails are open between 9 AM-5 PM.

Source

Mailchimp has similar results to campaign monitor - Confirming that the best time to send email is between 10 AM - 12 Noon.
HubSpot’s research found that late mornings are the best time to send email newsletters. The ideal time to send an email is 11 AM.

As you may have observed, the result obtained from each research varies. However, you can use the data to help you understand the appropriate time to send emails to your target audience. The best way to honestly know what works is to test your strategies.

Conduct A/B Split Test on Your Emails.

Analyze the data mentioned above and use them to develop a strategy that involves sending emails according to each. Then A/B test different sets of data to figure out the one that brings the best result. The highest open rate is usually a good determinant in figuring out the best time to send emails.

Your goal is to figure out the best time to send emails and figure out what kind of email works with your target audience.

Things to Consider When Choosing the Time to Send an Email.

Now, you've gotten a better idea of the best time to send emails. So let's go over the essential things you must consider when choosing the best time to send emails.

1. Email Subject Line

Email subject line is a huge driving factor when it comes to email newsletters. It's the first thing that your audience will see before reading your email. So if it's not written compellingly, it could discourage your audience from reading your emails. So, ensure that your email subject lines are:

Benefit driven.
Written to spark curiosity.
Short and detailed enough.
Written with a sense of urgency
Written with relevant emojis for humor

2. Audience Demographics

When it comes to audience demographics, you should note that different industries have different target audiences, so it makes sense that the data obtained above provided varying results. However, other factors may have influenced them. The most important is audience demographics. So, before you send out emails, you need to understand who your target audience is.

Are they small business owners who only have time to check their emails after the day's work? Or are they the 9-5 workers who check their emails during lunch hours? Once you figure out what your audience's day-to-day activities involve, adjust the day and time you send your email to fit your target audience's activities and work schedule.

3. Email Frequency

How often do you send emails to your audience? If you often fill up their inboxes with irrelevant offers, you've probably created an unfavorable impression which could affect subsequent email newsletters, hence reducing open and click-through rates. So you need to ensure that you send emails at an appropriate frequency that won't leave your audience quick to forward your emails to the spam folder.

4. Make Use of Advanced Reporting and Analytics Tool

To arrive at the best conclusions regarding the best time to send an email, you need to ensure that you track the right metrics. The most important metrics to track include:

Open rates: this indicates the percentage of people who open your email. A higher open rate means that your email performance is excellent.
Click-through rates: it indicates the total number of clicks divided by the emails sent. You could have a high open rate and a low click-through rate. So a high click-through rate is also significant because it shows the number of engagement people has with your emails.

To dive into the details of each metric, an advanced reporting and analytics tool such as Google Analytics can provide relevant data to help you keep track of your email marketing performance. Although the process may take a bit of brainwork, the effort is key to discovering how your audience interacts with your email newsletters.

5. Make Use of Email Marketing Automation

The more personalized your email newsletters are, the more chances you have to get higher engagement rates which are where email marketing automation can come in handy. This feature enables you to deliver the relevant emails at the right time. As a result, you won’t need to deal with high bounce rates, low open rates, click-through rates, and engagement.

If you want to get the best use of automation, consider investing in an email marketing automation tool.

6. Customer’s Device

Most emails are usually opened on mobile devices. For a good reason, mobile devices provide the flexibility to navigate through emails, check notifications on the go and even make online purchases. Even studies have shown that 75% of emails are opened on mobile devices.

So, you need to send email newsletters that are optimized for mobile devices. If your email design doesn't properly fit your recipient's screen, it could create a wrong impression, and customers may not engage with your emails.

7. User Experience

The structure and appearance of your email list play a huge role in how customers react to your emails. A disorganized email with a flat design may discourage your recipient from engaging with your email. Don't let people spend a long time reading your email newsletter to figure out the message you're trying to deliver.

Include relevant CTAs, bullet points, and short but detailed paragraphs. Include well-designed graphics to make your email more engaging.

8. Your Niche

In this case, your niche is in line with your target audience. So once you’ve figured out your target audience, it becomes easier to know the best time to send emails.

How to Choose the Best Time to Send an Email.

As mentioned earlier, there’s no defined best time to send newsletters. You need to figure out what works for your business. However, it would be best if you considered the factors mentioned above to guide your decision.

Consider the results of your A/B test and analyze the best time that works for your customers. For example, you can decide to divide your contact list into two. Send the first half in the morning and the second half in the evening (on different days). Analyze the results and create more tests.

Wrapping Up

The timing of your email newsletter is an essential factor in your email marketing strategy. Although we’ve thrown light on different research data that highlights the best time to send newsletters, what matters is your target audience, email type, niche, and time zones.

Here’s a brief recap of everything we’ve discussed:

Understand your target audience, including their behavioral patterns.
Run tests to figure out what works for your business and customers. You can use two or three options.
Consider the time zones before sending out email newsletters.

Once you’ve figured out the best time to send emails, you can use the opportunity to tweak your email subject lines and copy for improved open and click-through rates. To understand your target audience and send emails at the right time, you need to power your email marketing campaign with the right marketing automation tool.

Engage is an Email and SMS Marketing automation solution that will help you send emails at the right time and day to your customers.

With Engage, you can:

Keep track of how customers interact with your product (platform or app),
Create unique customer segments from this data, and
Send personalized messages to your customers via email, SMS, push notification and in-app messages.