If you’ve been in business for quite awhile, then you would most probably be collecting an email list of potential and current customers. So if you’re wondering how can you fully utilize this email list that you have to send emails that have better opens and click-through rates, then this article is for you. I will be sharing with you the best time to send emails your upcoming marketing campaigns.

When it comes to sending an email campaign, timing is very important for success. Whether it’s the time of the year (as in the month), the day of the week and the actual time that the emails arrive in your subscribers’ inboxes. This is all very crucial.

You might have been trying to read a lot of articles online on the best time to send emails for better open rates and clicks and have gotten a lot of contradicting answers. Well, the reason is – the best timing for a business may not be suitable for other businesses. This all depends on your target audience.

So to make matters more simple for you, let me explain to you some of the key things you need to consider when deciding on your email blast timing.

The first thing you need to identify is whether or not you are serving B2B (Business-to-Business) or B2C (Business-To-Consumer) customers. This is because customers from these different categories will behave very differently and this will impact the best timing for sending your marketing emails.

Here’s why:

A B2B customer will be likely to read your email from his or her corporate email. So you would want to reach out to that person during office hours or at the time he or she has access to his or her corporate email.

A B2C customer will most probably only have time to read his or her personal email when he or she is not at work or lunch break.

Best Time To Send Emails To B2B Customers

So ideally, if you are serving B2B customers, you would want to send them sales or promotional emails during office hours in the middle of the week (Tuesdays to Thursdays at around 10 am). This is because this is the time that they will be concentrating on getting their jobs done. So sourcing for products that will help their companies and meetings with their colleagues for discussing product requirements will be done during this time.

On the other hand, on Mondays, a typical employee will be busy sieving through a ton of emails. Most promotional emails will end up in the ‘Trash’ instead of being read. And on this day, people will be busy making schedules to complete the tasks for the entire week. So they won’t have the luxury of reading promotional emails.

On Fridays, many employees will be busy thinking about completing the work that they need to get done. So they’ll be in the ‘rush’ mode and not in the mood to look around for stuff to buy on behalf of their companies. They’ll also be thinking about what they’ll be doing during the weekend (as in their hobbies, events and etc.). So Fridays are also not a good time to send emails if you’re targeting B2B customers.

Best Time To Send Emails To B2C Customers

For B2C customers, the best time you would want to send your newsletters or promotional emails is early in the morning (as in when they are commuting to work – at around 6-8 am), lunch time (around 11 am-1 pm), in the evening and late at night (8 pm-12 midnight).

A surprising thing that I found out through my survey is that midnight might be a good time to send cold emails too! I’m guessing, the survey must have been done based on B2C customers…

And for the retail or entertainment space, you’ll be able to get high engagement for your emails if sent on Fridays – although, for retail, conversion to sales might not happen until Saturday!

General Email Sending Tips

For both B2B and B2C customers, the best days to send your email campaigns are on Tuesdays, Wednesdays & Thursdays. However, Tuesdays and Thursdays are deemed as the best days during the week to send emails.

Weekends are not good for sending emails for both B2B and B2C customers because everyone is busy with their activities during the weekends. So they won’t have time to read promotional emails. And public holidays are also no good for email campaigns because everyone will not be checking their emails on those days.

And of course, the worst time to send emails is during a time when everyone is sleeping! That means – any time after midnight to before 6 am.

Please bear in mind that these times are only estimates as to when would be the best times for sending email campaigns. The best thing you can do to determine the times that would work best for your business is to send your email campaigns at different times to test and see which times work more than others.

Another important thing you need to do is to understand your target audience, their behaviours and habits. The longer you’ve been in business serving them, the more you’ll be able to understand when they’ll be most likely to have the time and enthusiasm to start noticing your emails and opening them.

Use this article as a guide or a starting point when sending your email campaigns, but not as a rule. Remember, the time that works for another business may not work for you. So use these times and continue to test and tweak your campaign sending times to perfection.

Sometimes, achieving a good open and click-through rate for your email campaigns can be also affected by other factors. For instance, are you writing your email subject lines in a way that makes people want to click on them?

Have you followed any of these email campaign sending times and have gotten more opens and clicks for your emails? What times work the best for you? Or do you have other tips on the best times to send emails to customers? I’d love to hear from you in the comments section below.

References:
https://optinmonster.com/the-best-time-to-send-emails-heres-what-studies-show/#:~:targetText=According%20to%20their%20data%2C%20the,at%20that%20time%20of%20day.
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/09/04/best-time-to-send-email-campaign
https://coschedule.com/blog/best-time-to-send-email/
https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2019/01/best-time-to-send-email-campaigns-by-device/
https://www.verticalresponse.com/blog/best-time-send-email-marketing-campaign/
https://sleeknote.com/blog/best-time-to-send-email
https://justcreative.com/2019/04/17/email-best-time-to-send/