What’s The Best Time Of Day To Send A Marketing Email?

There’s no doubt that email marketing can be tricky at times.  Figuring out what the best time of day to send a marketing email to your list is one of the pieces to the puzzle that needs to be solved.

The good news is that I’ve researched and pulled together the data from various email marketing companies in this one post.

Here’s all the resources of data compiled:

Let’s dive in now and take a look at when to send your marketing emails.

What Is The Best Day To Send Emails?

Spoiler Alert: The best day to send varies and can only be found by testing with your own email list.

But let’s take a look at the data out there to see of we can get a good idea of what might be the best day to send out an email marketing campaign.

First up, a 2013 study by GetResponse reveals the best day to send emails based upon the CTR or click-through rate.

Here’s the infographic that came about after pulling all the data together.

Best Day To Send Email Marketing Campaigns Based Upon Click Through Rate (CTR)

When evaluating the best day upon CTR, you can see from GetResponse’s data above that the best day to send marketing emails is Tuesday with an average of 19.9% open rate and 4.55% CTR.

The second best day would be Friday with a 19.6% open rate and a 4.9% CTR.

The key takeaway…

The weekend email marketing results can be seen as significantly lower than weekdays in terms of open rate percentage and click-through rate percentage.

In a more recent study done by Campaign Monitor in 2020, key findings were put together to define global email marketing benchmarks.

Email Marketing Benchmarks And Trends In 2020

Interestingly enough, Campaign Monitor came up with the key finding that Tuesdays see the highest open rates of all the days of the week.

At the same time, Tuesdays also resulted in the highest unsubscribe rates of any day.

The year-to-year comparison between 2019 and 2020, revealed that the average email marketing benchmarks remained relatively consistent overall for bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, CTR, CTOR (Click-To-Open Rate), and open rate.

What Is The Best Time Of Day To Send A Marketing Email Campaign?

The specific time of day to send a marketing email is inherently a little more tricky since you’ve got a few more variable to work with than just days of the week.

However, let’s dive into the hard data and hopefully gain some unique insights into when to send your next email to your list.

Here’s the results of a study done by Intercom:
Time Of Day To Send Email Marketing

The graph above shows distinctly that Tuesday at approximately 10am is the best time of day to send email marketing campaigns.

One thing that I also find interesting about this graph is that the timeframe in the morning between 10am to 11am consistently received the largest percentage of email messages opened every single day.

Another thing to note is that Thursday at around 10am came in a close second.

In a similar study done by GetResponse, the percentage of messages along with the open rate, click-through rate, and click-to-open rate were collected.
getresponse-best-time-email-day

This study was done primarily to determine the best day to send marketing emails but shows once again that Tuesday is the best day to do it based upon the data. 

One thing that’s not talked about often is email lifespan even though it in some ways is inherently linked to the time of day you send a message out.

Email Lifespan

GetResponse compiled their data once again and found that 23.8% of all opens occur within the first hour of delivery.

This means that if you don’t get the exact time of day right to send out your emails, then you could lose out on sales and obtaining customers.

According to Hubspot, the highest number of email opens occurs at 11am with 30,000 total emails opened.

Hubspot Best Time Of Day To Send Marketing Emails To Your List

Once again, we see that the morning hours are where the largest number of emails are being opened.

The final study to take a look at is one that was done by Omnisend.

Best Hours To Send Emails

The data shows that the highest average open rates occur at 8am, 1pm, and 4pm.

Additionally, the highest average click-through rate occurs at 8am, 1pm, 4pm, and 5pm.

What Are The Worst Days For Email Marketing?

One interesting data set to look at that was compiled by Campaign Monitor is the worst days for email marketing.

Worst Days To Send Emails

The data revealed that…

  • Worst day for email open rates – Saturday
  • Worst day for click-through rates – Wednesday and Saturday
  • Worst day for click-to-open rates – Sunday
  • Worst day for bounce rates – Friday and Saturday
  • Worst day for unsubscribe rates – Tuesday

When Should You Email Your Own Email List?

The best question you can ask is when you should email your own email list.

Based upon the data, on average the best time of day to send out marketing emails to your list:

  • Tuesday is the best day to send emails
  • 10am is the best time to send emails

If we’re being honest, the best time time to send emails to your own list could vary greatly from this consensus.

There’s a reason why you always hear to split-test your headlines and always test things with your email list.

It’s because the number of variables make it certain that there’s no general time that can be thrown out to send emails and have it work for everyone’s individual email list.

It’s important to test sending out campaigns at different times and look at your reports.

Remember, the best data set is your own email list.

Frequently Asked Questions

The best day for sending email marketing is generally considered to be Tuesday.

The best email marketing providers in my opinion would be either AWeber or ActiveCampaign.  You should choose AWeber if you want your small business to focus on affiliate marketing.  On the other hand, if you want a great all-around email autoresponder then definitely go with ActiveCampaign.

The best rated email marketing services that are well-known would be GetResponse, AWeber, and ActiveCampaign.

The best email autoresponder in my opinion would be ActiveCampaign.  They have next-level automation capabilities and incredible email deliverability.

Email open rate is the percentage of email subscribers that open an email versus the total number of subscribers.

Email click-through rate or CTR is simply how many email subscribers click a link or image in an email. 

Email bounce rate is how many emails are never sent to the specified email address.  Consequently, those emails will never be opened or any have any action taken.

It is recommended to not send marketing emails on the weekend.  Instead, the best time of day to do email marketing would be either Tuesday or Thursday around 10am.

It’s not okay to send emails at night, since the lifespan of an email tapers of dramatically every hour.  If all you do is send emails when everyone is asleep, then you’ll more than likely have terrible open rates.

Affiliate Disclaimer

I hope you enjoyed this post. This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to purchase through my links at no additional cost to you.

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