When Is The Best Time To Send Out Email Campaigns?

By Julian Lynch
Account Director

Clients frequently ask us about the best times to send out their email campaigns in order to maximise click-through rates and conversions. With all the effort that is put into achieving great results through content and design, it certainly makes sense to consider the best times to actually deliver the communications.

Day of week for best responses is a moving target through the year, based on seasonality and also on what the masses of other marketers are doing at the time. This is certainly a subject in email marketing which results in many conflicting opinions.

A study by eROI late last year on the effectiveness of email campaigns found Monday as the clear leader in both open rates (35.5%) and clicks (5.9%). There was a general drop-off in opens and clicks the rest of the week.

However, results from "Q3 2005 Email Statistics" eROI study found that the weekend may be a better time to send email marketing campaigns i.e. on Sunday and Friday, but to avoid the middle of the week.

eROI went beyond the general data to look at the day-of-week statistics by list size. eROI analysts say their findings reaffirm their earlier research-namely, that sending volume is inversely related to how read and click rates. The bigger the list, the less efficient it will be.

'Micro mailers' with lists of fewer than 5,000 contacts (which would classify almost all Irish email marketers) had read rates that averaged slightly over 35% and click rates between 5% and 9%. Those results are well above the broad average of 27% and 4.4%. The weekends were the best time for click-throughs, averaging 8% to 9% versus 5% to 6% for Tuesday through Thursday.

As with all US based research it is necessary to make some decisions in terms of how accurately it reflects the situation in Ireland. Generally Irish email lists, given their relatively small size, are easier to manage and therefore tend to be of higher quality than lists in the US and result in lower bounce rates and higher click and read rates.