The Best Time to Send Your Email Campaigns (Based on 92,000 Campaigns Analyzed)
Is there a best time to send emails?
To answer this question, we, at Omnisend, have analyzed nearly 800 million emails in the hopes of uncovering the hottest opportunities and best practices that lead to high conversions.
As an ecommerce automation platform, we have a diverse collection of brands using our tools to send email campaigns.
For the benefit of this experiment, we dug deep into our archives and gathered unique data on 9,500 different brands that collectively sent more than 92,000 email campaigns (that’s more than 791 million emails, by the way).
This has given us an unparalleled insight into the key aspects of a successful email campaign, including:
- the best hour to send emails
- the best day of the week
- the best day of the month
However, it’s worth noting that without a strong email list, garnering great results from these best practices will be difficult.
We highly recommend you explore some simple tactics, such as using an exit-intent popup, to collect more emails from your visitors and eventually increase your conversions.
That being said, let’s jump straight to our findings.
What’s the best hour to send emails?
We look at the open (how many sent emails were opened) and click-through rates (how many sent emails were clicked) to determine timing success. Having this data at hand will help you achieve better results with minimal tweaks.
Generally, there are three main factors that this depends on:
- User availability: are they likely to be online? On their lunch break? In meetings?
- Competition: who else is emailing them at that time?
- Relevance: is there anything specific about your niche that you need to consider?
The spectrum of niches within this data set is rather varied, so it’s difficult to draw conclusions on relevance.
The differing time zones can also distort findings, so to make things simpler, we zeroed in on campaigns sent in one area with one time zone – the UK.
With these conditions in place, we look at the data for answers about the other two aspects – user availability and competition.
Once the click rates and open rates are plotted based on hours, you can see a pretty clear trend line emerging. However, it’s important to keep in mind that the total campaigns sent can affect the significance of those rates, so we include data on the total campaigns sent to provide a more complete picture:
Looking at this chart, we can easily identify 5 pm (17h00) as the sweet spot: with at least 450 campaigns sent, it has the best combination of open rate (19.7%) and click rate (3.98%).
The other high open or click rates, while impressive, are likely skewed due to a small sample size.
Whether it’s due to fewer emails being sent around that time or people having more time on their hands, 5 pm seems to be the best time of day to reach out to your customers.
What’s the best day of the week to send emails?
With so many variables at play – a tantalizing subject line, intriguing snippets, relevant offer and even weather – it’s nearly impossible to know which day of the week is the best-performing day for your email campaigns.
That’s why we had to analyze 791 million emails to get a reliable answer. But that’s good, because now you don’t have to!
We narrowed our search to look into audiences from the US, Canada, Australia, UK, and India audiences and determine which days of the week are getting the best open and click-through rates in those markets.
If we look only at open and click-through rates, Wednesday (averaging a 19.6% open rate) and Sunday (with a 4.4% click-through rate) seem to be the obvious frontrunners. However, we need to be careful about drawing conclusions here without looking at the total number of campaigns sent.
Taking everything into consideration, we see that with an average open rate of 19.61% and a click rate of 4.3%, Wednesday is the best day of the week to send out emails, and Thursday is a close second.
What’s the best day of the month to send emails?
Knowing the best day of the month (or even the best period of the month) to send out your emails is particularly useful to companies that choose to send out bi-weekly or monthly newsletters, or run special once-a-month campaigns.
When we analyzed our data, we pinpointed two key days – the 1st of the month with an open rate of 19.87% and the 4th of the month with an average open rate of 19.68%.
When it comes to click rates, the 4th tops the list with a 4.53% click-through rate and the 21st is trailing close behind with an average click-through rate of 4.52%.
For a more comprehensive view, we look at the total open and click rates compared to campaigns sent and find that the 4th of the month seems to have the best overall rates.
So what’s the best time to send emails?
To summarize our findings and make some conclusions based on what we’ve discovered, these are the key lessons you should remember:
The best time to send emails will probably be 4 pm on a Wednesday if you’re sending regular campaigns.
If you’re into monthly newsletters, then the best time to send your email campaign would be on the 4th of the month, or at least nearer to the beginning of the month.
As salaries tend to come in either at the very end or beginning of the month, this is a logical conclusion to make.
That period also represents the golden opportunity for ecommerce brands, since it encapsulates the perfect conditions for buying: people with sufficient funds who are emotionally ready to buy.
Here’s a nifty chart that pulls all our findings together:
As always, we highly advise you to use statistics and data as guidelines and not follow every piece of advice blindly. Test the best practices and see if they work for your business.
As is often the case, the situation that works best for someone else might work worst for you. This can be due to a lot of different factors, but it is generally your responsibility as an ecommerce marketer to figure out when things align well and when they clash and conflict.
But when you find that golden middle, using your own knowledge of your audience’s likes and dislikes, along with this data we’ve gathered from more than 92,000 campaigns sent, it’ll be well worth the wait and work it took to get there.
So with that, I’m sure you’ll see some great, steady increases in your open and click rates, and of course significant increases in your sales.
Good luck!
Bio: Bernard Meyer is a content marketer for Omnisend, the e-commerce marketing automation platform dedicated to helping e-commerce stores build strong, lasting relationships with their customers. He also has a passion for good research and helping e-commerce businesses with their multichannel marketing needs.