When are the Best (and Worst) Times to Send an Email?

When are the Best (and Worst) Times to Send an Email

Everybody loves social media, and more people are getting into blogging. But despite all this, email still remains the go-to strategy in any marketing campaign. It never fails to deliver a goal, whether it’s leads, active interactions, warm business relationships, and even new professional acquaintances. It simply is the most basic communication line in the corporate world.

Related: 7 Stats that Says Email Marketing is the BEST Among Other Channels [INFOGRAPHIC]

But while its effectiveness isn’t diminishing, the attention that it used to enjoy is now facing tough competition; prospects now have more things to attend to compared to 5 years ago, and that lessens the odds of emails being read at an optimum time.

GetResponse, an email marketing software firm (www.getresponse.com), analyzed more than 21 million emails in the first quarter of 2012. These are some of their findings:

  • 23.63 percent of all emails are opened within the first hour; that number drops off precipitously as the hours tick by;
  • Most emails are sent from 6 a.m. to noon; the least amount occurs from midnight to 6 a.m.
  • The hours that see the most click-throughs are 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., and 3 p.m. and 8 p.m.
  • The hours that see the most opens are 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., and 3 p.m. and 4 p.m.

According to the study, the best time to send emails is when “customers are reviewing their inboxes”. This usually happens more during the mornings and early afternoons. However, because of the apparent change in lifestyle of today’s generation, some factors may affect the open rates of emails.

In theory, an email sent between 3-4 p.m. (according to the study statistics) has a 23.63% chance of being opened in the first hour after it was delivered. But in reality, at 5:00 p.m. people are actually on their way home or stuck in traffic. Between the hours of 6-8 p.m., they would be doing house chores and eating dinner, and the next time they would probably have time to check their emails again would be after 8 p.m. The problem is 4 hours after delivery, the open rate chances have already dropped to less than 5%, in theory.

Still, according to the study, most emails appear in inboxes in the morning; hence, those emails sent in the afternoon have more chances of being noticed, opened, and clicked. For maximum open and click rates, schedule emails to land in inboxes no later than 1 hour before top open times, and that’s 8-9 a.m. and 3-4 p.m. The key is to not let your message lose impact by waiting too long in the inbox.

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