Recent research in a popular industry publication claims the best day to send an email marketing message is a Thursday, it was met with cries of ‘untrue!’ and ‘depends on the industry’ and ‘depends on the location’.
So the debate evolved into about ‘What to send’ rather than ‘When to send’.
The company analysed what it said were a total of one billion email marketing messages, sent by 350 marketers in Australia.
Thursday was narrowly the day that delivered the highest open rate for emails, of around 22%. It is also the day when the most emails are sent. However, the day that delivers the highest clickthroughs once an email has been opened is Tuesday, with about a 9% clickthrough.
Excluding the weekend, the days delivering the worst open rate are Mondays and Fridays. Friday also delivers the lowest clickthrough rate.
Hard evidence.
However, there a growing school of thought that an email’s position in the inbox is relatively unimportant – a campaign can have an equally good chance of being opened and read, regardless of whether it’s top of the pile, or in 10 deep.
Another study conducted found that
“Whilst email open and click activity varies by 10% during the day, it doesn’t automatically follow that campaign performance will be sensitive to exact time of send.”
The study that compared metrics from emails that went out at the ‘very worst’ time (1 January, ie. new year’s day) with results from previous campaigns, they found an open rate variance of merely ”2.7 percentage points, or 6.6%”. Hardly a disaster and far less damaging than say, sending an email with a not-so-obvious call to action (which of course, happens to the best of us).
There are much stronger factors at work when it comes to determining an email’s success, such as:
- Subject line and from name
- Content relevance
- Previous experience of your emails
- Brand loyalty and engagement
Convinced?
We’d like to hear your thoughts…
Does sending campaigns at a certain time/day considerably affect response? Let us know in the comments.
