The Best Day to Send Email

We could give you what you are looking for here and specify an exact day. But the true answer is "it depends": you need to pick out your best guesses based on what you know of your audience, emails and organization and then test to find the winning day.

 

What do studies say

Most experts are wary of benchmark reports that aggregate numbers across thousands of senders to find which day of the week produced the best open or click rates. After all, if you have a "what to do this weekend" newsletter, you're not going to send it on a Sunday morning just because that's when studies say the average list gets the best open rates. You don't have an "average" list. Another argument against using aggregated benchmarks is that the reported "best" day keeps shifting around. Here are some "best day of week to send" results (based on open rates and some measure of click rates)...

(As reported by MailerMailer for 2006 - 2009:)

	Opens	Click Rates
H1 2009	Sunday	Tuesday
H2 2008	Monday	Monday
H1 2008	Sunday	Monday
H2 2007	Monday	Tuesday
H1 2007	Monday	Tuesday
H2 2006	Monday	Wednesday
H1 2006	Sunday	Saturday

So, yes, the "best" day keeps changing. But note how often the weekend and start of the week pops up compared to, say, Thursdays.

Does that mean we should always send sometime between Saturday and Monday? No, because we still have the issue that your list and organization has its own unique characteristics that might make Thursdays the best day. In fact that "what to do at the weekend" email might perform best on Thursdays, when people are beginning to plan their Saturday and Sunday. But these aggregated stats do have value.

Here's why...

First, if you really can't come up with any realistic "best guess" day, then benchmarks are a starting point...it's worth testing the weekend or early week for your emails.

Second, these stats bring home the point that you need to base your decision on the right metric. The reported best day for opens is rarely the same as the best day for clicks. And the best day for conversions may be different again. What are you trying to maximize?

 

Past performance and segmenting by daily responses

The following principles may help you to find out the best day to send your email:

1. Look back at your campaign reports and see if you can pick up on any patterns. Do emails sent on a particular day always get better results?

2. Define segments based not (just) on what people click, but also on which day they click. Not everyone on your list has the same email habits. You may find some that check email on weekdays only. And others that use Sundays to catch up on email. Segmenting by "preferred day" lets you better time your sends to match the recipient's email habits.

3. Try and predict your target customers behaviour. For example, if people are looking to book a weekend away, they will more than likely start to look at options at lunchtime during work on a wednesday or thursday. Find out what is the best time to hit these potential customers with an email.