When Is The Best Time To Email?

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When Is The Best Time To Email?

As an online newsletter publisher, I care about open rates and click-through rates. If I didn’t, there would be no point in publishing a newsletter. If people aren’t reading it, then why bother? It would be a waste of my time.

I keep up on current marketing trends, and studies have been conducted to determine the best day to send out a newsletter for a better click-through rate.

I’ve always heard that Monday was a bad day. Think about it. Most emails are read Monday through Friday because it’s the standard work week, and business emails are a large portion of the email world. When people come in to work on Monday morning they have a barrage of emails that have accumulated over the weekend that must be sifted through. Your email may be one that gets overlooked.

However, in the past week I have reviewed two different studies, one from Aweber (the service that I use) and the other by Exact Target, an email marketing company based in Indiana.

Exact Target’s white paper, “Myth Debunked: No Such Thing As A Best Day” by Morgan Stewart, was a result of seeing two studies with varying results. These results stated that Monday was the best day, but past studies led marketers to believe that Tuesday was the best day.

So what is the best day? The results of Exact Target’s study, which was comprised of 800 million emails in 160,000 email campaigns of 2000 companies, concluded that there really isn’t a “best” day to send an email. However, there are some interesting results of the study:

• 97% of all emails were sent Monday through Friday.
• The days that have the highest open rate do not have the best click-through rate. This means that you need to determine what is more important – opening the email or clicking on links.
• Industry publications may “jinx” your statistics. For example, as stated in Stewart’s report, the two previous studies were conducted in the second quarter of 2004. Since 2004, Mondays have been ranked the 5th best day to send an email.
• In the second half of 2004, studies showed that the latter part of the work week sees the highest open rates, with the highest being Friday. However, it was less than one percent higher than Wednesday or Thursday.
• If you’re looking for higher click-through rates, you’ll want to send your emails on the weekend, but remember that you won’t find the highest open rates at that time.

Based on Exact Target’s findings, at some point in time each day of the week was found to be the best day.

I do test and track open and click-through rates with my own newsletter, and here is what I’ve found. Sending emails on Tuesday between noon and 2pm Eastern Standard Time works the best for me. I have sent emails every other day of the week, as well as Tuesday at 8am, and none of them have a higher open rate than Tuesday afternoons. As far as click-through rates, I do send occasional special announcements out on the weekends, and they do have a higher click-through rate.

Let’s apply some logic to this. When you get an email campaign, they usually want you to buy something. When you’re in the middle of your work day, you usually can’t stop and whip out your credit card to make a purchase like you can when you’re at home. However, when you’re at home on the weekends, you’re probably not sitting in front of the computer because you’ve been sitting in front of one all week.

In all honesty, I think it’s 6 of one, half dozen of the other. Test to see what works for you and your subscriber base. Don’t take the word of the experts. Tuesday is still a really good day for me, but don’t be surprised if you occasionally receive my newsletter on a Thursday or Friday, or even a weekend. It’s just me, testing to see if I’ve still “got it”.

To view the Exact Target white paper in its entirety, you may download it at http://email.exacttarget.com/pdf/Best-Day.pdf

About the Author:

Heather Jacobson doesn't pay for marketing if she doesn't have to. Discover how she does it and claim 10 free marketing tips at http://www.10freetips.com