As part of my routine for some of my clients, I am responsible for the creation and distribution of their email campaigns. I stumbled upon this useful post on Buffer Social by Belle Beth Cooper, highlighting the best times of the day and week to post tweets, Facebook posts, emails and blog posts.
Here’s an excerpt that I extracted for the purpose of focusing on email campaigns:
There’s been lots of research done on the best time to send emails, particularly in the case of email marketing. Some research done by Dan Zarrella from Hubspot broke down each time of day and worked out which type of emails work best for that period. Here’s what he found:
- 10pm–6am: This is the dead zone, when hardly any emails get opened.
- 6am–10am: Consumer-based marketing emails are best sent early in the morning.
- 10am-noon: Most people are working, and probably won’t open your email.
- Noon–2pm: News and magazine updates are popular during lunch breaks.
- 2–3pm: After lunch lots of people buckle down and ignore their inbox.
- 3–5pm: Property and financial-related offers are best sent in the early afternoon.
- 5–7pm: Holiday promotions & B2B promotions get opened mostly in the early evening.
- 7–10pm: Consumer promotions are popular again after dinner.
What I thought was really interesting about this breakdown is why each type of email is more popular at certain times. From 3–5pm, for instance, the reason people open financial and property-related emails is that they’re more likely to be thinking about their life situation and how to improve it. Understanding how these time blocks work can be a good start to sending your emails at just the right time.
And since 23.63% of emails are opened within an hour of being received, this is something we definitely want to get right.
For more general emails, open rates, click-through rates and abuse reports were all found to be highest during early mornings and on weekends.
