The Best Times to Send an Email to Drastically Improve Your Open Rate

Let’s dive right in!

In contrast, by sending your emails at the wrong time, you risk:

There’s no doubt that the timing of your emails has a major impact on your campaign’s click-through and open rates, as well as your other metrics.

Let’s get into when we should and shouldn’t be sending emails.

This is the million-dollar question — to answer it, let’s explore what various research suggests is the best time to send an email.

The case studies referred to in the following sections are results for the best time to send promotional emails and newsletters for B2B businesses.

Research done by email marketers found that the best day to send an email for the highest open rates is mid-week.

Here are the results compiled from several studies:

Knowing what the worst time slots are will help you avoid the unnecessary pain of low email open rates.

These are considered the worst times to send an email:

Your audience is unique to your business.

Instead of taking these recommended times as gospel, you should instead use them as a starting point for setting up your own email sending schedule.

To figure out the best time to send an email to your audience, you need a good understanding of your target audience’s buyer persona.

To better understand your audience, you can ask yourself these questions:

If you don’t know your audience, then you’ll have a hard time figuring out when they’d prefer to receive emails from you.

Besides knowing your target audience, these factors can also influence when you should and shouldn’t send your emails:

Let’s explore these in some more detail.

The best day and time to send your email marketing campaigns are unique to your industry.

Here are the best days based on open rate data for multiple industries:

Research shows that Thursdays are best for high open rates, and Tuesdays are best for high click-through rates:

Here the goal would be to capture your audience’s attention and get them to click through your content.

For this, the best sending times are generally when there’s little competition: Fridays, weekends, and evenings.

If a quick scan will do, then sending an informative email during working hours on a business day will keep your business in your audience’s minds.

You can send an email a day before, and one hour before an event or a webinar is set to begin.

When determining the best time to send an email, you also need to consider that your target audience will have their own time zone.

For example, if your list consists of US and European subscribers, you’ll need to segment them based on their geographic location.

You won’t get desirable results for your email campaigns if you simply send an email blast to your entire list irrespective of their time zones.

You can use tools like Google Analytics to get a deeper understanding of your audience’s age, gender, location, and interests:

Knowing when to send an email isn’t an exact science. Instead, the data gives you a good starting point to find what yields the best results for you.

Test the time slots and days that are in line with your marketing goals and your industry.

Remember, what works for some email marketers might not work for you.

With a tool like systeme.io, you can schedule your emails and test the recommended sending times with ease:

The best way to tell whether the recommended time slots and days work for your audience’s email engagement patterns is to test, test, test!

With a tool like systeme.io, you can track the performance of your campaigns and monitor your opens, clicks, bounce rate, and more:

To take a look at the email marketing benchmarks for your industry, click here.

Experimenting with sending times will allow you to draw your own conclusions based on the metrics that matter most to your business.

Test to find what sending times give you the best email open rates, click-through rates, and of course, conversions.

Trial and error will help you find your email sending sweet spot — but what if your desired metrics are still low?

Well, perhaps the timing isn’t the problem.

Timing doesn’t guarantee that your emails will be opened, let’s get into what else you can do to improve your email open rates.

Your subject line can easily determine whether or not someone decides to open and read your email.

Are your subject lines currently captivating enough to drive those opens? Here are some tips to help you improve your email subject lines:

Although you’re writing business emails, your writing should be in line with how you’d write to a friend or a family member.

Nobody likes salespeople because nobody likes feeling like they’re being marketed to!

Invest time and energy into making captivating subject lines, and you’ll see a noticeable difference in your email click-through and open rates.

For more on subject lines, click here.

Fine-tune your email marketing strategy by regularly running A/B tests on everything . . . Literally everything!

To measure success, you need something to measure it against — and the only way to improve is to regularly experiment to see what works best.

You can test things like your email subject lines, the color of your CTA, your send times, and more — but be sure to test one variable at a time.

This allows you to determine what’s having an impact on your open rates.

You’ll want to test until you find what works, and when you find what works, keep testing!

Your target audience’s preferences and habits might change — test frequently to ensure your strategy’s still working to attain the metrics you’re after.

With a tool like systeme.io, our editor will automatically adapt your emails to make them compatible with mobile devices.

Once you’ve decided on a time to send your emails, it’s best practice to keep your sending times consistent.

Consistency has a number of benefits:

Besides consistency, you’ll also want to keep an eye on your email frequency.

Too many emails will likely annoy your subscribers, and too little won’t have the desired impact — test to find what frequency works best.

Failing to do this can increase your spam reports and this can ultimately harm your email deliverability and sender score.

Email automation is something that every email marketer should have in their toolbox — it lets you deliver the right message, at the right time.

By using a tool like systeme.io, you can take the guesswork out of when you should send a particular campaign or email.

This is because, with powerful automation, you can send your emails based on your recipient’s behavior.

For example, if people sign up to your mailing list, you can automatically trigger welcome emails to be sent to your recipient’s inboxes.

With systeme.io, you can set up automation rules to ensure that your audience gets the right email, right when they need it.

Simply tag your customers based on their actions, and automate your marketing with workflows and IF/THEN automation rules:

With a tool like systeme.io by your side, you can fine-tune your email marketing without spending hundreds of dollars.

Let’s get into what this powerhouse can do for your business.

Not only is systeme.io a one-stop-shop to send marketing emails, but our platform has everything you need to launch and scale your business:

On average, you’d be looking at around $26/month for just an email marketing tool.

But with systeme.io, you get an all-in-one marketing machine with affordable pricing plans like this:

All of our plans, including our Free plan, give you unlimited:

Plus, you’ll get:

And more!