When personalizing email newsletters at Retail Rocket, we constantly monitor a variety of performance indicators for our newsletters, including the Open Rate. The most effective way to get the recipient to open an email is with an intriguing, irresistible subject line. But another proven way to increase the number of emails read is to choose the optimal time for sending.
There are a huge number of studies that answer the age-old question: when is the best time to send emails? At the same time, the findings often contradict each other. Despite the contradictions, in this article we will evaluate the results of several independent studies at once, allowing us to determine the optimal time to send emails. Then we will reveal the secret: how to actually know when to send an email newsletter.
When to send?
A 2013 GetResponse study doesn’t give a direct answer to the question of However, it does explain why this question is so important. The lifespan of an email campaign—the time it’s most likely to be read—is surprisingly short. That’s why it’s so important to send at the right time.
Please note that the probability of an email being read 24 hours after it is sent does not exceed 1%. That is why, when you have the opportunity to focus on only one detail, or when deciding how to start the working day, choose to send an email newsletter and do not put it off until lunch. If you send a newsletter at the optimal time, but on the wrong day of the week, all your efforts may be in vain.
Research on optimal times of day and days of the week
According to Experian’s Q4 2013 study , Sunday is recognized as the best day to send emails. Researchers claim that the best time to send an email newsletter is from 8:00 PM to 11:59 PM.
According to Dan Zarrell’s research, described in his book ” The Science of Marketing ,” the most productive days to send are Saturday and Sunday. According to the research, the best time to send is 6 a.m. because that’s when the click-through rate is highest, although 8 p.m. to midnight is also a good time.
Harland Clarke Digital barbados email list 67672 contact leads over 1 billion emails in 2013-2014. This study is also interesting because it looks at which mobile devices people use to view email.
Thanks to this level of evaluation, Harland Clarke found clear advantages of Friday over Sunday in terms of the “mobile channel” itself. The same can be said about 8-9 p.m. compared to 8-9 a.m., along with 3-4 p.m., depending on the type of device.
Despite some similarities in the data presented in the studies, GetResponse was still able to determine the most effective day of the week. When they analyzed more than 300 million messages from their customers last October, they found that Tuesdays saw the highest number of opens, while Fridays saw record clicks.
How to get the best results for your newsletters?
So, we have the information we have from the research, but there is no guarantee that these “golden” days and times will work best for your business. To finally find out what really works best in your segment and for your subscriber base, you need to test.
How do you do this? Luckily, when to send you don’t need a huge subscriber base to do this; usually, 1,000 recipients are enough to get reliable average data.
But how representative the experiment result will be really depends on the subscriber coverage, the number of opened letters and the percentage of clicks. Let’s look at an example.Discover the best practices for combining SMS and email newsletters. Read the article ” How to Perfectly Combine SMS and Email Newsletters: Practical Tips for Marketers ” and start putting the tips into practice.
Example of an experiment on 1000 recipients
Let’s say you have 1,000 subscribers and you want to test whether the best time to send emails is 2:00 PM on Tuesdays or 2:00 AM on Thursdays. To test, send the same email to half of your subscribers (i.e. 500 of them) on Tuesday, and then send the same message to the other half of your subscribers (the other 500) on Thursday.
The data suggests that Thursday is the best day. But are these clicks and email opens enough to prove that Thursday is truly better, when to send or is Thursday just a fluke because we don’t have the full picture due to lack of data.
This is what the results might look like
If we enter the obtained results into the the web directory legacy service (a service that allows us to predict winners not only for contextual advertising ads, but is also perfectly suited to our tasks), it becomes obvious that in fact the current information is sufficient to say unequivocally that Thursday has won.
We compared the open rates of emails in each segment (Tuesday vs. Thursday). As a result of the calculation, we can be 95% sure of the winner.
To measure the results now by clicks, we will set the data as follows and get a 90% probability of the winner being reliable.
Which is a bit concerning
We can be 90% confident that we will get more clicks on Thursdays. This is a pretty good result, but a little lower than expected. However kcrj it is advisable to aim for at least 90% confidence in your tests.
To be sure, you need to run the test again with the mailing two or three more times (that is, over two or three weeks) to make sure the result is stable.
In real life, the results do not always show the winner so clearly. It can take a whole month to find out which day is better, when to send will ultimately increase the percentage of email opens and clicks by 10-30%.
In the next part of the article, we will share our own research from Retail Rocket on planning personalized trigger mailings .
Conclusions
- The optimal time to send emails helps increase your Open Rate and click-through rates.
- Research results:
- GetResponse (2013): It’s important to send emails when they’re most likely to be read; the lifespan of a newsletter is short.
- Experian (2013): The best day is Sunday, from 8:00 PM to 11:59 PM.
- Dan Zarrella: The most effective days are Saturday and Sunday, when to send 6:00 a.m. or 8:00 p.m. to midnight.
- Harland Clarke Digital (2013-2014): Friday and evening hours (8pm-9pm) are best for mobile devices.
- GetResponse: Tuesday has the highest number of opens, Friday has the highest number of clicks.
- How to know the best time for your business: Run A/B tests with different days and times to check the effectiveness. Example: send emails to 1000 subscribers, dividing them into two groups of 500 people, and evaluate the results.