Timing is everything. When you send an email, or when a recipient receives an email, has an enormous impact on open-rates and clickthroughs. L.L. Bean, Encyclopedia Brittanica and Henry Schein are among the many marketers who have revised delivery times and have seen an increase in open-rates of between 30% and 100%. You don’t have to do anything differently, just watch the clock… and see results.

We all know it’s not a good idea to send an email at 4 a.m., or on a Sunday. But when is the best time to send an email? Here are a few ways to time your emails better.

Worst Days and Times:
• Don’t send emails after 5 p.m., on weekends or public holidays. Most people are out of the office on Saturday and Sunday. Remember there are different holidays in different countries.
• Don’t send emails on Monday morning. Most email users have a lot of emails when they get to the office, and they tend to cleanse their inbox pretty quickly.
• Don’t send on Friday afternoons. People are going for the weekend or thinking about that cocktail, and they’ll delete anything non-essential.

Best Days:
• Over 60% of all emails are opened between Tuesday and Thursday. This is especially true for B2B and business-oriented communications.
• If you have to pick a day, pick Wednesday. MarketingCharts found that the average open rate on Wednesdays was over 25%, higher than any other day of the week.
• Send surveys Tuesday and Wednesday, so that they can linger in the inbox and still get the users attention the same week.

Best Times:
• Mornings are better. According a the MarketingSherpa study, clickthrough rates for emails sent at 9 a.m. performed more than 15% better than those sent at 4 p.m.
• The best times to send an email are 10 a.m. – 11 a.m. or 1 p.m. to 2 p.m.

Time Zones:

• Watch out for time zones. Don’t send emails that people on the West Coast will receive before 9 a.m.
• There are two ways to conquer the time zone problem.  Either send emails in the afternoon, so that users across the United States will all receive them during business hours. Or, if you know Zip code or state, you can choose to divide your list into time zones.
• If a lot of your recipients live in other countries, you will probably want to segregate your list so that people receive your email when they are most likely to read it and take action.

Tags: clickthrough, open rate, send, time zone, timing, trigger

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