A question often asked is “what is the best day to send emails?” And of course the answer… “Well, it depends.”
Too many marketers try to follow ‘day of week’ trends from big stats groups. I recommend against paying too much attention to what national surveys say for two reasons:
A. If a report says ‘Tuesday’ is the best day to send, and everyone in the country starts sending on Tuesday (I know it’s a bit exaggerated), then Tuesday would quickly diminish in quality with everyone being blasted with emails.
B. More importantly — every industry is different, every company is different, and every list has the capability of behaving differently.
So then what is the best day to send email? Let’s look at a few elements:
1. B2B or B2C? If your subscriber persona is a strict 9-5 business employee, then Friday at 4 or over the weekend probably isn’t the best idea.
2. Are Weekends Always Bad? No. In the example above, I wouldn’t recommend weekends. But what about a B2C product that targets mothers age 35-45? Might they be logging in some email checking over the weekend? I vote yes. I had one client that tested a weekday vs. weekend for a similar type of audience and saw a 85% increase in conversion with the weekend groups.
3. What about Monday? Going off of the 1st example, Monday probably isn’t too great either (aren’t you quite busy getting back to work on Monday?). This leaves us with 3-4 days for testing our B2B sends.
4. So Tues/Wed/Thurs for B2B? That looks like a decent starting point, but still does not completely answer our question of what the best day is to send email.
What to Do:
A. Know what you want to accomplish. Is your main goal a quick read for a timely notice, a click through to read more content, a click through and purchase of a product? etc…
B. Understand your recipient’s profile. Create a persona around them and among other things, determine what they are doing at different times and on different days. When will they be most likely to engage in the way that you want them to?
C. Use some common sense to eliminate some possibilities.
D. TEST. We love to throw this around, but it’s true. Do some day of week and time of day testing and you may be very surprised at what you find. If there is a huge difference, then great – you have now identified some valuable information for YOUR email program. If after significant testing you find microscopic difference between day 1, 2, or 3 then you now have some flexibility.
E. Test again.
For those marketers that don’t want to take the time to work through the elements above and must have a quick answer, I vote Wednesday at 3:00pm or Thursday at 9:30am
- Forest Bronzan
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Other posts you might find of interest:
Introduction to Email Segmentation
Email List Building Mistakes
