So you're sending out emails to your customers. You have an enticing title, an eye-catching layout and informative, engaging content. But you're not getting quite as strong a response as you had hoped. Many of your emails aren't even being opened. What is going wrong?
It could be that you are choosing the wrong day or time to send your email. If your email doesn't arrive in the inboxes of your customers at precisely the right time, you are risking your message being lost or deleted before it is read. The longer your email sits in a customer's inbox, the lower the chances become of it being opened. So how do you optimize your email to send at the critical moment when it will have the best chance of commanding your customers' attention?
The thing is, every company's customers are unique. There are thousands of articles and studies out there telling you to send your emails on a Thursday at 2 p.m. or a Sunday at 10 a.m. or a Tuesday at 9 a.m. Almost every page you read seems to suggest a different optimal time. You may find, however, that these guidelines do not apply to your customers. Different companies, different customers, different sending times.
So test different days and times. What is the optimal time for your particular list of customers? If you are a retail store that always starts a new promotion on Saturday, the busiest retail day of the week, perhaps your email advertising the weekly promotion would get the most opens if it was sent on a Friday evening as people make their weekend plans. If you are a telecommunications company, maybe the best time to send an email about upgrading your phone plan would be a Tuesday morning, when people are at work, settling in after the Monday rush and thinking about how to make their communications more efficient.
So think about the customers on your list. If you are a Business to Business (B2B) marketer you may get more opens by sending your emails during the week. If you are a Business to Consumer (B2C) marketer you might get better results by sending on or around weekends. Try sending emails at times and on days that you think would work best for your customers. Then check your open rates, how many people responded to your call to action (if you asked them to "purchase now" or "click here," for example), and how many emails were unread. If something is not working, try a different day, time or both and test again.
According to my reading, B2B emails get the most opens when they are sent midday during the week. Coupon websites often get higher responses to their emails by sending on the weekends. Many different industries seem to find that the middle of the day, around 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., works well as a sending time. Although there is no set day that is agreed upon, Monday to Thursday seems to be favoured by many companies who find success sending on those days. There are always exceptions. Test different times and days to see which ones work best for your company.
