The Best Time To Send An Email

By Posted on 3 min read 906 views

I was in the pub last week with some internet marketers when the topic of conversation cropped up about what time to send your emails. There was a heated debate with everyone having different opinions.

Of course, it’s going to depend on a number of different factors such as your market, whether your subscribers work from an office or at home, what country they live in etc…

But there must be a general standard, across the whole emailing industry, of what is the best time to send your emails on average.

A few days later I was in the pub again with a different group of internet marketers, yes I know they all seem to like the pub!, and I was introduced to someone who worked for one of the biggest emailing companies in the UK. A company that sends millions of emails every single day across all markets.

Here was my chance to find the answer to my question once and for all.

I didn’t jump straight in with the question, but decided to sweeten the deal first with a few drinks. However, this proved harder than expected as the waitress had decided she didn’t want to be working that evening and was doing her best to ignore all the customers.

Anyway, a couple of guinness’s  later and I broached the subject of emailing.

But before I tell you what he told me, I want to tell you about the results of our own split-tests.

Over the last few months I’ve been running split-tests emailing at different times of the day and the results have been very interesting. I’ve tried emailing very early around 7am but found it wasn’t that effective.

It’s the “baby-work-run” a friend said, and he had a point.

This is the time when all the mums and dads are either getting their children ready and off to school, or heading off to work themselves. Sending them an email at this time is likely to be at the bottom of their inbox when they come back to check their emails after they’ve got into work and settled down.

That proved to be true in our own split-tests and the middle of the afternoon had similar results. I would imagine for similar reasons!

We then tried early evening, around 5:30pm and late evening around 9pm.

The later one was significantly better than the earlier time, and again this makes logical sense as it could be the first time that people have had a chance to sit down at their personal computers all day and go through their emails.

And then, we have the time that I have always emailed at…

10am

Without fail this has always produced the best results for me.

Anyway, back to my conversation in the pub.

I approached the subject of emailing carefully, and by the time we reached the fourth pint I casually dropped into the conversation…

In your experience what’s the best time to send out emails to maximise the open-rate?

With hardly a break from drinking the answer came back…

11am

It was then backed up with the fact that this needed to be in the local time of the recipient of the email and, of course, it was market dependent. But, overall across all markets, this is the best time to get your open-rates maximised.

Since then we’ve been emailing at 11am and found that we’re getting a higher percentage of open-rates than we were at 10am.

So, if you want to forego all the split-testing for your mailing list then I suggest that you simply send out your emails at 11am!

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