When it comes to email marketing, sending time is often overlooked.
Many marketers focus on crafting the perfect subject line and content, but the timing of when you send your email can have a significant impact on open and click rates.
If your email arrives at 3 a.m., there is little likelihood that the recipient will open it directly. Rather, when he checks the next day, your e-mail will be in his mailbox in a mass of other e-mails also sent at night.
Given the amount of email people receive these days, chances are the recipient will simply delete your email.
Why Does Sending Time Matter?
- Audience Availability: The timing of your email should be based on when your audience is most likely to be available and checking their inbox. Sending an email when your audience is asleep or busy with work or school may result in lower open and click rates.
- Inbox Clutter: The time of day and day of the week can impact the number of emails your audience receives. Sending an email during a busy time may result in your email getting lost in the clutter of other emails.
- Time Zone Differences: If your audience is spread across different time zones, sending an email at a specific time may result in some of your audience not being able to see your email when it arrives.
How to Determine the Best Time to Send Your Emails?
- Analyze Your Email Metrics: Analyzing your email metrics, such as open and click rates, can help you determine when your audience is most engaged. Look for patterns in your metrics to determine the best time to send your emails.
- Consider Your Audience: Consider your audience’s behavior and lifestyle. Are they primarily office workers, or do they work from home? Are they most active on weekends or weekdays? Understanding your audience’s behavior can help you determine the best time to send your emails.
- Experiment with Different Send Times: Conduct A/B testing by sending emails at different times to a subset of your audience. This can help you determine the best time to send your emails and improve your email engagement rates.
Best Practices for Sending Emails
- Avoid Peak Email Times: Avoid sending emails during peak email times, such as Monday mornings and Friday afternoons, when your audience is likely to be bombarded with emails.
- Consider Time Zone Differences: If your audience is spread across different time zones, consider sending emails at different times to ensure that everyone has a chance to see your email when it arrives.
- Stick to a Consistent Schedule: Once you determine the best time to send your emails, stick to a consistent schedule to help your audience anticipate when they can expect to receive your emails.
How Campation PostOffice™ optimizes the sending time for each recipient?
Our WordPress plugin Campation PostOffice™ comes with Campation IntelliMail™, an AI-supported function that optimizes the sending time of all emails individually for each recipient.
Through machine learning, every time a recipient opens/clicks one of your emails, their “best sending time” is updated. Therefore, Campation PostOffice™ knows “Recipient A usually reads his emails at 9:30 p.m.”, “Recipient B is a morning person and sits at his PC at 6:30 a.m.”.
If you send a newsletter (or a plugin any automated emails), all emails to recipients for which a reliable “best sending time” could be determined are put into a waiting state and sent out of the outbox queue when the individual best time has come .
With Campation Mailschedule™ you can also specify that emails should only be sent at certain times – for example your office hours (Monday-Saturday 08:00-18:00). This prevents automated emails from being sent at 2 a.m.
Both functions lead to significantly higher email opening rates, because if your email arrives while the recipient is reading its emails, your email will receive significantly more attention than if it gets lost in a clutter of many emails.