When Is the Best Time to Send an Email Campaign?

Timing is everything… or is it? Is send time optimisation the right approach for email marketing success? 

When you’re planning an email marketing campaign, every element of your strategy impacts overall performance. One crucial aspect is in choosing the optimal days and times to send campaigns, both of which directly relate to open rates and, ultimately, ROI.

To pick the best times and days, most marketers rely either on advice on the internet or send time optimisation tools offered by some email platforms. Both of these approaches are far better than simply picking times at random, but they are still based on broad data that doesn’t account for your business and audience's unique personalities, quirks and habits. But that still doesn’t mean you can’t do better.

The real answer for anyone who wants to choose the best time to send an email campaign is that it depends entirely on your audience. If you’re willing to work on improving strategies for the rest of your campaign, you need to employ a similar approach to optimise your send times. 

So how do you build better send-time strategies into your campaign? Let’s dive into the topic and find out.

Don’t rely on send time optimisation

First and foremost, we need to clarify: you can’t rely on send time optimisation from every email marketing platform. Although these tools rely on data gathered from past campaigns to develop automated send-time suggestions, it doesn’t mean they are always reliable.

Tools like this can lure marketers into a false sense of confidence, and they begin to rely on send time optimisation, unaware of the following drawbacks: 

• Send time optimisation uses broad data from past campaigns to calculate suggestions, which means it’s often not up-to-date and can be generalised across thousands of campaigns. 
• Too many businesses rely on similar tools, which means your campaigns could arrive at the same time as competitors. A Validity study that found that 70% of all emails were sent in the first 10 minutes of any hour.
• It relies on subscriber-level data tracking, something that may begin to be penalised via initiatives such as Apple’s MPP. 

Send time optimisation should ultimately only ever be treated as a general guideline. You need to dig deeper into your audience and their behaviours to get ahead of your competitors. 

There is also a new alternative in the form of view time optimisation, a service offered by Everest by Validity. This is a far more accurate sending system that only sends campaigns when it detects a user is looking at their inbox. It currently only works with Yahoo but already promises as much as 45% more views per campaign than average. 

If you want to explore this solution, contact Jarrang. We partner Validity, which means you can enjoy dedicated support from a UK team while harnessing the power of a global software provider. Learn more about our work with Validity in this joint webinar on email deliverability from our Masters series.

Ignore general guidelines (mostly)

If you’ve found this guide via Google, you may have already seen other articles that give you specific days or times that are ‘best’. Here’s a quick summary of the advice from the top guides you can find online:

• “Campaigns perform best when sent midweek, with the best results on a Tuesday or Wednesday”. 
• “Send emails at the start of a day during work hours – usually between 9 am and 11am”. 
• “Avoid sending campaigns in the evening or at the weekend, when people are less likely to check their emails”. 

Now, bearing all these tips in mind, you should largely ignore them. General tips like this are taken from large-scale data studies which again don’t account for your individual audiences and campaigns. 

A B2C tool manufacturer, for example, may find that their audience doesn’t check emails during traditional working hours as they are engaged in physical labour on building sites. Instead, their campaigns may land better at the weekend or later in the day. 

Plan for your audience’s behaviours

The ultimate success of your campaign comes down to whether you capture your audience's attention. To do that, you must understand who they are and their routines. This means knowing when they’re most likely to engage with your emails – which can vary considerably based on everything from job sector to demographic and even device preferences. 

Ask yourself the following:

• When did your subscribers first sign up to your list? Use this as a baseline to see when they might be active. 
• What are your subscribers interested in, and what is their relationship with your brand? Are you B2B or B2C?
• What do your audiences do for a living, and how might that impact their online activity? 
• What is the ‘ask’ of your campaign – are you asking them to buy a product, sending general information or trying to increase engagement?

Use these answers to help develop audience segments and set your send times around their lives. For example, if you’ve got a young demographic who are likely to check their smartphones regularly at work, you should send your campaign on a weekday – perhaps during lunch or just after it. 

Respect time zones

If you’re sending to multiple countries – even those whose time zones are only an hour apart, you should stagger send times accordingly. This can even reflect back to user habits, as some countries may treat certain times differently. For example, sending a campaign to a Spanish audience during the ‘siesta’ period is unlikely to lead to strong results. 

Don’t bunch global campaigns together and assume they’ll all be treated equally – use a scheduling tool to spread them out and arrive when each of your audiences is most receptive. 

Stagger your send times 

Earlier in this guide we demonstrated that most businesses send their emails within the first 10 minutes of any hour. To differentiate yourself, make sure you stagger send times throughout the hour. You don’t need to send your campaign to all 10,000 users at the same time – experiment with sending in batches that are staggered by minutes or even hours. This will also help you gather more data from different send times to help inform future campaigns. 

Customise based on device

Open rates and engagement can vary considerably based on a user’s device preferences. You can target these preferences and tailor times accordingly if you have created effective segments. Desktop users are more active during office hours, but mobile users check emails late into the evening. 

Tailor your content

As you begin to explore the best times and days to send emails, you should experiment with subject lines and content to see if specific approaches are better for a specific time. For example, sending an emoji-laden subject line promising cheap deals on weekend breaks is likely to be more effective when sent later in the week.  

Experiment, test and tweak

When you’re ready to get started, you should choose a baseline day and time to send your campaign. Stagger these sends as suggested in this guide and run A/B tests whenever possible. This will give you immediate insight into how well campaigns may be performing at different times, which you can use to inform future campaigns. 

Find the best time to send an email with Jarrang

Ultimately, finding the best time to send an email campaign depends entirely on you and your audience. You must approach it strategically and use testing and tweaking to refine your results. 

If you need help putting this into practice or want to speed up the timeframe towards better email ROI, speak to Jarrang. We can help you improve every aspect of your campaign and even guide you through tools like Everest by Validity to bring powerful digital insight to every decision. 

Interested in better email marketing? Give us a call today.