Best Times to Send Email Business Messages

By Rhonda Campbell

Even if you design email newsletters that are visually appealing and engaging, newsletters that are packed with paragraphs of valuable content your subscribers appreciate, if you don’t send out your newsletters at the right times they might not get read. It’s easy to notice the impact of the day and time of day you email newsletters if you send initial or trial newsletters on different days of the week.

Best Times of Day to Send Emails and Online Newsletters

As a small business owner or freelancer, you can also find out which days of the week and times of day are best to email newsletters if you work with newsletter software companies that provide metrics for each online newsletter you distribute. Data included in newsletter metrics are the numbers of opens (people who actually clicked on and opened your online newsletter) and clicks (people who clicked links you built into your online newsletter). Spam notices (percentage of people who contacted the newsletter software company and said your online newsletter was sent to them as spam) and opt-out notices (people who unsubscribed from your newsletter) are also included in newsletter metrics.


If you add social media share buttons to your online newsletter, making it possible for subscribers to share your newsletter with their friends and followers at social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, you can also receive metrics that reveal the number or percentage of subscribers who shared your newsletter with others. To keep up with updates, changes and trends regarding email marketing, consider reading information (or subscribing to newsletters) developed by marketing firms like Media Post’s.

For example, Media Post’s distributes Email Marketing Daily, an online newsletter packed with information about items like improving email emotional content, designing online newsletters for mobile devices and combining email and social media marketing efforts. In a recent newsletter, Media Post’s included a link to Legal Mentions’ October 19, 2012 “Email marketing effectiveness depends on the time of the day” article.

Time of Day Majority of Emails are Opened

The article points out the importance of knowing the best time of day to send newsletters. To know this, you have to also know the time of day when most subscribers to your online newsletter typically open your newsletter. As mentioned in the article and according to a study by GetResponse, “Morning messages are the most popular – 38.7 percent of emails are sent between 6am and noon. The afternoon gets 25.8 percent of emails, and the evening gets 29.6 percent.”

But, don’t stop there. Just because the majority of emails are sent in the morning, that doesn’t mean that’s the best time to send email newsletters. In fact, the study found, ‘“Because so many emails are received in the morning, messages sent at other times of the day, particularly in the afternoon, have more of a chance of “being noticed, opened and clicked.”’

The times when most people opened emails in their in-box were 8 a.m., 9 a.m., 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. This may reveal another trend; most people might open emails at work.

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Sources:

http://www.atelier.net/en/trends/articles/email-marketing-effectiveness-depends-time-day (Legal Mentions: Email marketing effectiveness depends on the time of the day)