We’re constantly asked by our clients “what’s the best time to send my email campaign”. Our friends from across the pond, Pure360 have identified patterns in consumers’ responses and below you will find an infographic depicting their findings and recommendations.

Choosing the right day/ time to send your email campaigns can have a huge effect on the overall results.  This being said, we recently published a blog article on this exact topic.  To read our recommendation on the best time to send your email campaign click here.

Choosing the right day to launch and send your email campaigns can have a huge effect overall results. Much of the process of deciding on a day will initially rely on intuition (Will people be packing up for the weekend on Friday and therefore be less likely to open emails? Will they be stuck in the doldrums on Wednesday and therefore be more likely to open?). Your decision will also depend on your list specifics and the idiosyncrasies of your target audience, meaning that best practices will be relative. However, there are some concrete steps you can take to determine what day your subscribers will be most likely to engage with the content you send them.

• Make an educated guess.

You know your customers better than anyone and you’ve had the chance to observe their habits over time. Take advantage of eConnect Email’s analytics tools to monitor open rates and click rates and then make an educated guess as to which day will be best for your email campaign based on what you learn.

• Test.

Don’t rely strictly on guesswork, however. Test your theories by sending emails on various days and observing how customers interact with them (again spend some time reviewing campaign stats from previously sent emails).

• Consider weekends vs. weekdays.

Aggregated benchmarks often point to weekends as good days to send email. If you engage primarily in business-to-business marketing, however, weekends probably won’t perform well for you.  On the other hand, many people can now check email from the comfort of their easy chairs via smartphones, making weekend email checking easier than ever before. Again, we recommend testing, reviewing results and testing again.

• Consider the email content.

Does your email discuss a weekend sale? Is it a newsletter that talks about best practices for business? How about a weekend gardening project? The day you send each email will be affected by what the email contains, so be willing to alter the content within your campaign if you’re sending a time-specific message.

• Be flexible.

Even if you’ve found the perfect day to send, it’s still important to remain flexible. You might usually send on Mondays, but you’ll want to alter your strategy for Labor Day weekend, for example.

The bottom line is that there is no perfect day to send email that will work for every business. The analytics and stats tools available from eConnect Email can help you determine what the best practice will be for your company in order to maximize the actions (opens, clicks, purchases) taken by your subscribers.

If you’ve been wondering when to send out your newsletter, you’re not alone.

Back in ’04, at least two prominent studies concluded that a Monday morning (6-10am) mail-out would get you the highest open rates, and apparently, if you couldn’t make Monday, Tuesday wasn’t half bad either.  The result? Email marketers fell over themselves and worked weekends to deliver a Monday morning newsflash, only to discover a year later that emails sent on Wednesdays through Fridays were enjoying the most clicks.

After that, it seemed no-one could agree.  Some argued that end-of-the-workweek or even weekend mailers were potentially more effective because of the lack of competing emails coupled with the relaxed mindset of readers, others claimed Tuesdays to Thursdays gave the best results, while the rest returned to their Monday delivery schedule.

As for time of sending, the assumption was that your email is likelier to get read at 9am, 12pm and 4pm, because those confined to work desks are either a) still settling in; b) getting ready for lunch; or c) winding down for the day. An electronics retailer tested these timings early this year and found 9am to be the clear winner.  The results were posted by MarketingSherpa, and it remains to be seen if this statistic will hold up after online marketers scurry to implement the 9am send.

Our advice?  Forget the research and conduct your own investigations.

Here’s how:

#1 View your last five sent campaigns’ open-and-click rates, and note the day and time these campaigns were sent.  Or find out what time your mail was read and the links clicked on, and whittle it down to the most popular timings, taking into account time zone differences.

#2 Carry out an A/B Split Test – set two different send schedules for your test group of readers (say Monday 9am for Group A, and Friday 4pm for Group B), and compare your campaign’s open-and-click rates. (For best results, ensure that recipients in your test groups are in the same time zone or location.)

#3 Know your audience – use eConnect Email reporting functions to see a breakdown of your audience by location; find out about typical working hours and national holidays, and adjust your send dates and times accordingly.

Marketers have also suggested looking at each subscriber’s sign-up or view-and-click time and customizing delivery times to match, although the strategy has been criticized as reading too much into a single random event.  To me, this is just plain ridiculous.

Once you’ve obtained your results, make a decision on your send times and stick with it until you feel compelled to conduct a round of tests again.  It’s probably better to focus your energies on producing a newsletter that subscribers will want to read, not whether it lands in their mailboxes at midday or midnight.