When’s The Best Time To Send Your Email Newsletter?

If you’re an email marketer sending marketing emails to customers, you’ve probably already asked yourself this: when’s the best time to send my newsletter? The time you schedule your emails determines how high your open rates and click-through rates will be. And there are a lot of factors at play when deciding the best day of the week to send your emails.

Below, we’ll give you some tips on identifying the best days and times to send your newsletters and some recommendations to improve your overall email marketing strategy.

Why does email sending time matter?

You’ve worked so hard to create the content for your next campaign: you’ve come up with powerful copy, a catchy subject line and great CTAs… and yet, why are your emails not being opened or clicked-through? It might be that you’re not sending emails at the right time.

The email inbox is a crowded space. Emails at the top of the inbox generally get better engagement than the ones at the bottom, which explains why the sending time is so important when planning your key email marketing campaigns.

Sending your campaigns at the right time can help you:

• Improve your open rates: Email open rates are the holy grail of email marketing. If your email is at the top of the inbox, your contacts are more likely to see it and open it, so sending at the perfect time is key to achieving that.
• Improve click-through rates: Even if your entire email list opens your message, you won’t get a decent ROI if no one clicks through. Sending at the wrong time might mean your contacts don’t have the time to actually read your email or to click on your great CTAs.

Understanding customer behavior, habits, and time zones can help you determine what the best day of the week and time of day to send your email is, and to ensure your message is seen first when your email subscribers check their emails.

Email send times: B2B vs B2C

People don’t use their professional and personal inboxes in the same way or at the same time. Some people rarely use their personal email addresses, while others get notifications every time a new email comes in. Some professionals check work emails regularly while others only do it during work hours or a couple of times a day.

To determine the best time to send your email blasts, you’ll need to ask yourself questions like:

• Do you send email newsletters to personal or professional email addresses?
• Is your email list more likely to check their inbox when they wake up or during their lunch break?
• Are your messages more likely to be engaged with during weekdays or during weekends?
• Do your contacts check their emails on the go from their mobile devices or do they wait until they are in front of their computer?

Keep in mind that this distinction between B2B and B2C is very important, as users behave differently when using different email accounts. If you have defined marketing personas, they will be very useful in understanding the way your email list engages with your emails to create email marketing benchmarks and to find the perfect time to send your messages.

What’s the best day to send your email campaigns?

Your sending schedule largely depends on whether you’re a B2B or B2C brand, and the industry you’re in. But in all cases, data shows that there are some days to avoid sending your weekly newsletters if you want to achieve the highest open rates.

The best day of the week to send emails

According to numerous studies compiled by CoSchedule, Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best days of the week to send your emails. Most emails are sent during these days.

Wednesdays, according to various research, Wednesday is a solid second option in terms of opens and clicks. If you send emails twice a week within these days, however, make sure to pick a combination of Tuesdays and Thursdays. Sending emails on Tuesday and Wednesday, or Wednesday and Thursday, will make your customers feel overwhelmed and not read your emails at all in the process. Not good.

And a caveat: people also get the most emails mid-week. Maybe you might want to send your emails on another day of the week to have less competition in the inbox.

The worst day of the week to send emails

On Mondays, people are either planning out their week or are sifting through the emails they’ve received during the weekend. And let’s be honest, we’re not the sharpest workers on Mondays. We’re still recovering from the weekend. So, as a bit of general advice, just avoid Mondays.

On Fridays, people have mostly tapped out on reading new emails and spend more time on social media than in their inboxes. So clearly don’t send your newsletters on Fridays.

And on Saturdays and Sundays – well, do you read your emails on the weekend? You probably don’t, and this is the same for others… avoid the weekends.

So always consider your target audience and the times they could be potentially looking at their emails. Formulating an email marketing strategy based on user habits, such as when they read their emails, can really improve your email marketing sending practices.

Choosing a day to send your newsletter

At the end of the day, the best way to choose a day to send your email campaigns is to do some A/B tests on your list. As a starting point, look at engagement data, past open rates and click-through rates and formulate some hypotheses based on past information.

No matter what, if you regularly send weekly promotional emails or newsletters, be sure to send them on the same day every week. This builds trust and anticipation as your audience will come to expect your content at that time.

During holidays or special events, don’t hesitate to send your newsletters at a later date or a different time. While consistency is important, it’s always preferable to send at a different time and get high open rates than to stick to your sending schedule and remain unopened.

What’s the best time to send your newsletter?

Generally, here’s how you can choose the best time to send your emails.

6:00 – 8:00 am

Some people look at their emails after waking up or during breakfast. Most of the time, they look at their emails via mobile, so make sure your emails are responsive and mobile-optimized.

10:00 – 11:00 am

According to many studies, this is the best time to send your emails – regardless of location. Studies show that 15:00 Universal Coordinated Time (11 AM in local timezones) is when emails are most likely to be read across the globe.

12:00 – 2:00 pm

This is also a great time to send your emails. While on lunch break, people will be looking at their emails before getting back work in the afternoon.

6:00 – 9:00 pm

This is the end of most people’s work days. Some will be looking at their emails during their commute, others right after work. But avoid sending emails after 10pm, as you will not be read immediately and by the time they get to their inbox in the morning, your email will have been pushed down the pecking order. If you’re sending in this time period, the earlier = the better.

How to determine the best time to send your newsletter?

As we have already said, the best time to send your emails depends on a lot of things – your business, your customers, your targets, your newsletter type, and so forth. Age, habits, and timezones (aim for 13:00 – 20:00 UTC, or 11:00 AM – 6:00 PM in your local timezone) are important elements that can have an impact on open rates.

Ultimately we encourage you to do your own A/B tests and analyze the best time for you and your customers. If you want to figure out what is the best time to send your weekly newsletter, you could do a test spanning two weeks.

For example, in the first week of the test, send your newsletter at 10:00 am, and then next week, send it at 3:00 pm. You can also try A/B testing by sending a campaign to half of your list in the morning and to the rest in the afternoon. Compare and analyze the results, and move onto the next experiment. Just like in science class. 🔬

Want to know more about email best practices? Check out our Email Growth Playbook, a database of 60+ tactics to help you increase the performance of your email campaigns.

Find the best time to send your emails with Mailjet

Finding the best day to send your email newsletters can be a difficult task that requires experimentation, time, and coordination when establishing the best schedule. As we have already mentioned, a lot of variables are at play, including the content and scheduling of your email campaigns.

Mailjet offers features that allow you to create, deliver and track your email campaigns. With an easy-to-use visual builder and many responsive email templates, you can create engaging newsletters in a few minutes. Our features include segmentation, A/B testing, Campaign Comparison and advanced statistics. These features allow you to really track and improve your email marketing results and find the perfect time to send your emails.

How to compare different email campaigns

Mailjet’s Campaign Comparison allows you to analyze different campaigns, effortlessly. This lets you figure out the best day to send emails backed by data. Our results page is packed with visual and quantitative data – everything you need to analyze and continuously optimize your campaigns. Here’s how to find it.

Step 1: Go to the Campaign Comparison tool. The “Compare Campaigns” button can be found in several places:

And on a campaign’s details page:

Step 2: From your Campaigns page, click the “Compare Campaigns” button. A new pop-in window will appear, where you can select up to 10 campaigns to compare simultaneously.

Step 3: Once you have selected all your campaigns, click the “Compare Campaigns” button to continue.

The results are displayed in a graph and summary chart format to let you easily determine what part of your campaigns your customers responded positively to.

You can view the results in a few different formats on the graph. If you hover your mouse at any point on the graph, a pop-up will appear showing the elapsed time at that point and KPIs for each campaign.

The data in the table shows the lifetime results for each metric of each campaign and is continuously updated. Both the percentage and total figures are displayed for each metric, and you can sort by campaign name, date, or engagement metric by simply clicking the “arrows” at the top of each respective column.

And that’s a wrap! You are now ready to compare and optimize your email campaigns – and on your way to higher opens and clicks.

Summing up

When it comes to finding the best time to send your emails, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. The type of business you have, your customers, the type of emails you send and your targets all determine what the best schedule for you is.

Using an email service provider that allows you to segment, test and compare your campaigns will help you analyze the different variables at play, to create the best email content, email subject lines and sending schedule to improve your open and click-through rates.

Want to receive more best tips and tricks to optimize your email marketing strategy? Sign up to the Mailjet newsletter!

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This article is an updated and translated version of Julie Paci’s article Quel est le meilleur moment pour envoyer votre newsletter ?