One of the most common questions people ask about Email Marketing is: when should I send my emails to ensure maximum performance?

It is impossible to provide a specific answer that will work for all businesses because these results are influenced by multiple factors, such as the interests and behaviors of the audience, the types of content or products being offered, and even more abstract factors such as brand values or customer expectations. Besides, even within a well-segmented audience, each recipient is still unique!

That being said, picking the right sending times and days can surely make a difference in your Email Marketing efforts, and there are a few ways to do this.

In this article, we will start from the principle that you are already following Email Marketing best practices – segmenting your audience, writing compelling copy, ensuring high deliverability, and so on. Here we will focus exclusively on sending times and dates.

Before we get into some data, keep in mind that the way to find out the best days and hours to send your emails is the same as the process for optimizing any other Email Marketing metrics: test, analyze results, and repeat!

But where to start? To give you some general guidelines and figure out if there is a day of the week of time of the day that has better Open Rates, we randomly picked 100 edrone clients from all industries and analyzed over 40 million emails sent.

Here are the results!

According to our research, our clients send the most newsletters on Friday (18.67%) and Thursday (18.51%). Monday (17.70%) is a strong third place. Tuesday (14.77%) came in fourth and Wednesday (13.74%) in fifth. The fewest newsletters are sent at the weekend: Sunday (10.49%) and Saturday (6.12%).

OK, but does that mean that these days also have the best conversion rates? To find out, we analyzed these client's orders by day, and this is what we found:

As you can see, almost every day is good for shopping! I could be surprising to notice that working days have the best performance in terms of order volumes, with Saturday having the lowest performance, followed by Sunday – which is relatively better, but still below average. A possible conclusion is that the weekend, especially Saturday, tends to be reserved for relaxing after a hard week's work or even shopping in physical stores instead of online.

To summarize, this research shows that emails are most often sent at the beginning and the end of the workweek, and work days are also the best days for online shopping. It's important to reflect if this makes sense when engaging your target audience, but it is a good starting point for your first tests.

Great, now we know which tend to be the best days of the week to send emails. Now let's find out what's the best time of the day!
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Here are our client's metrics:

This shows that most emails are sent in the morning during working hours, more specifically at 08:00 (11.83%), 09:00 (12.50%), and 10:00 (11.45%). From 11:00 forward we can see an evident drop in shipments until 13:00, when there is a slight rise peaking at 15:00, then going back down again until reaching almost zero at 22:00.

Why is that? The most likely explanation is that, during working hours, especially in the morning, is when people tend to check their emails more often – and that's especially true with work emails, since some estimates point that users check their personal emails around once a day, while work emails are checked, on average, around 20 times a day!

Great, but that doesn't mean recipients are actually reading them, right? So, how do the Open Rates look like?

Interestingly, email opens are a bit more evenly distributed from around 08:00 to 19:00. However, it is clear that most emails are opened in the morning, specifically between 08 – 09:00, dipping at 10:00 and peaking again at 11:00. There is a notable drop in email opens during the afternoon, rising slightly again between 16:00 and 18:00, and decreasing sharply after 19:00.

Again, there is no right answer to this question. The only way to know for sure what's best for your business is running some tests, monitoring the results, and repeating this process over and over.

However, if you need some tips on where to start, the insights we gathered from our clients' metrics show that sending emails on Mondays, Thurdays and Fridays between 08 – 09:00 would probably be the best starting point.

After that: experiment, analyze, and repeat!

Need more help?

If you have any further questions about the best times to send your emails, please do not hesitate to contact us at hello@edrone.me