There is no “one size fits all” answer to when is the best time to send email. For B2B, you want to catch people when they may have more time to review emails. The beginning and the ending of a work week are usually pretty hectic times. It tends to be better to communicate in the B2B sector during the middle of the week (Tuesday through Thursday) than at other times. For the B2C space, times vary widely based on the industry, your email recipients, the time of year/month/day and what, and how (mobility) you are communicating to your B2C email recipients.
Put yourself in your email recipient’s shoes to get a more scientific view of this question. It is worth the time and effort to set up a test that will provide the statistics you need to make a determination what is the “best time to send an email campaign” for your particular business. This test will take into consideration your message or offer, your audience and their email reading behavior. It should be conducted over a period of 14 days, 7 for sending emails and 7 for responses to the emails to come in from your recipients. Utilize an analytics package, such as Google Analytics, to provide the statistics on your email marketing campaign to determine what works for each audience and each email campaign. At the end of this process, you will have a lot more confidence knowing when is the best day, and even time of day if you factor that variable into the test, for you to send out an email campaign.
Remember too that there is a “rush hour” for email marketing just as there is on the roads. When you send at the same time as everyone else, you are more likely to end up a victim of clutter in the inbox or slower delivery times in transit.
So let’s review the process:
- Set up a strong message with an offer likely to be acted on.
- Turn on Google Analytics and configure it to track goal conversions.
- Set up a campaign for a 168 hour send.
- Send evenly over a 7 day period so that you have even audience reception.
- Wait a week after the campaign ends.
- Create a custom report to analyze by time of day.
- Identify the time of day when conversions are highest.
I found your site from Linked In. This is valuable information for a business with an established email list. Unfortunately, it does not help small businesses like mine with tiny mailing lists. I only have 104 people on my list. I would be interested in learning additional techniques for capturing email addresses that are in compliance with CAN-SPAM
Tim
Check out this link. It has some solid information for small businesses on how to grow you email list. http://bit.ly/go4TOU
You may be tempted, at some time, to purchase an email list. Resist that temptation. In the end, you will be better off growing your list organically.
Stew Friedman
http://www.paypervisitemail.com
This is a great post. I have noticed that the days/times that emails are opened between B2B and B2C clients vary and I particularly like the test email idea you outlined. Thanks for the insight!