What's The Best Time To Send An Email To Maximize The Response Rate?

There you are, sitting at your desk, writing the perfect email, giving the exact information that your target audience needs, and you hit send. 

But wait!

The person you want to reach out to is fast asleep, in a completely different part of the world. As he wakes up in the morning, his inbox is filled with many emails. Now, what are the chances of him putting in the extra effort to find yours from that bunch? 

Whether you are sending promotional emails or B2B emails, timing is a crucial aspect. What's the point of running an email campaign if no one even opens the emails you send out?

Are you one of those people who are busy measuring the success of their email campaign by analyzing the click-through rates? It is indeed a crucial parameter, but you must ensure that your emails get opened to get more clicks.

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Now you must be wondering, "when is the best time to send an email?" 

You learn what works for you by actually sending some emails and monitoring them. However, unlike most others, you don't have to start from scratch. Here, you will get access to the insights most marketers have gained over time after sending several emails and trying different strategies. 

Let's take a closer look to understand the best time to send an email for maximizing the response rate. 

What Is The Purpose Of Your Email?

The time to send your email highly varies based on its purpose. Are you sending out promotional emails or B2B emails? Do you wish to inform people about your company’s recent product launch? Or, are you planning to put forward the proposal for potential collaboration?

Instead of blindly choosing the time slots that you may come across in marketing blogs, focus on the purpose of your mail and your target audience.

Promotional Emails

According to Omnisend, if you plan to send promotional emails, you must target 5 pm. This is the time that received the maximum click-through rates. Promotional emails get the maximum response rate when sent during work breaks. Due to this, 1 pm and 5 pm are most likely to work out in this scenario.

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Wordstream shows the best days you can target for sending out newsletters. These days ensure the maximum response rate for your emails. 

B2B Emails

GetResponse, the tool that email marketers love, did a little analysis to come across the best time to send an email.  According to their analysis, the highest click-through rate was either at around 10 am or 6 pm. The study shows that the emails got opened the most when people started their day or concluded it. 

But when it comes down to B2B emails, people will check them during their work schedule. Sending them on a weekday at around 10 AM will be the right choice. We will evaluate this further in the later section of the article. 

Next, we will move further to another crucial aspect that affects the best time of sending an email. The behavioral patterns of your target audience will help you in making the appropriate decision.

Understanding The Behavioural Pattern Of Your Target Audience

How can you expect your email campaign to offer you the desired results if you don’t know your target audience well? Once you go through and understand the recurring patterns, you will eventually identify the perfect time for sending out emails. 

This section of the article will give you some actionable tips to understand the patterns that could change your campaign’s results entirely. 

Using People's Sleep Schedule To Your Advantage

Earlier, we mentioned how the people you are targeting might be asleep, dreaming, while your email goes unnoticed. During our research, we found out that Klaviyo used people's night schedules to its advantage. How?

By understanding their behavioral pattern. 

Most people start their day by checking out emails. Trust me; not everyone begins their day by scrolling through Instagram and catching the steamy gossip of the day. Well, you might be shocked to know that comparatively, more people go through their inbox after waking up. 

According to Klaviyo, if the emails reach the receiver by midnight, they are more likely to come across the same early in the morning. 

This strategy might work wonders or be a poor decision depending upon how your audience responds. Some might get pissed at being approached early in the morning. If you are planning to experiment with this strategy, make sure you are prepared to lose some subscribers. Klaviyo's strategy did work out well for some businesses.  

Send Out Emails 4-5 Days Before An Event

Let's say you have something big coming up, and you are announcing the same through emails. Some might open it within 5 hours of sending the email. What about the rest? 

Some people will be greatly interested in what's coming up but will open the email two days later. To be on the safer side, and improve your response rate, make sure you send out emails 4-5 days before an event. 

Moving on, let us talk about some generalized times and days that you can experiment with.  According to the analysis by GetResponse, the highest click-through rate was either at around 10 am or 6 pm. 

This shows that the emails got opened the most when people started with their day or concluded it. 

10 am On A Tuesday (Best Time To Send An Email)

Did you know that the average email open rate is 17.8% across all industries? Do you think it would be the same if people ignored the importance of time zones? If you keep up with marketing blogs, you must know that 10 am on a Tuesday is their favorite time. 

Here comes the importance of time zones; You must ensure that the person you are sending an email to receives it at 10 AM on a Tuesday. We have never heard a person saying that I woke up in the middle of the night only to find the perfect email with a catchy subject line sitting in my mailbox. 

That will never happen. So, make sure you are scheduling your emails, keeping in mind the time zones. 

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CoSchedule clearly shows how Tuesday is the best time to send an email to maximize your response rate.  There are many email scheduling software that you can choose from to ensure you are sending your emails at the right time. 

Bu, if you want to save your time from juggling between different software, Dotcompal has you covered. It will provide you all the various tools that your business requires in one place. Save the extra hassle and invest your time in other important avenues.

How About Mondays? Is It The Right Time To Send An Email?

People often come to me with this question regarding sending out emails on a Monday morning. So, do you think that people are energetic and ready to open their emails to see what's in store for them? Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but most people hate Mondays. 

Why? They are still trying to get over the mad fun they had over weekends. Also, you will never know, but the chances are that your email might reach a person who hates his job. By pinging him on a tiring Monday morning, you are just wasting your time. 

To sum up, avoid sending emails on Mondays.

Never Let Tuesday, Wednesday, And Thursdays Slip Through

If today you make a move and approach some of the top email marketers of all time, you will repeatedly hear about these three days. Omnisend says about the three most popular days of the week for sending emails. Thursday proved to be the most responsive day of the week so far. 

Email marketers officially love these three days of the week when it comes down to sending out emails. Why? The response rate is the highest, especially for Tuesdays and Thursdays.  

Should You Avoid Early Morning Slot (8-9)

Most marketers avoid the early morning slot. But has it always given disappointing results? 

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Well, Wordstream's data says otherwise.  According to Wordstream, their open rate was 25% when they sent the emails between 8 am to 9 am on Thursdays. 

The data analysts also claimed that they experienced an open rate of 5%, which was very low, during the same time slot. The only difference was that they sent the latter on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings.   

The Best Time To Send An Email: What If I Avoid Competitive Days? 

After going through the data regarding the competitive days of the week, this question might pop up in your head. If almost all marketers are targeting these days, what if I go with a different approach? 

What if the less competitive days prove to be effective for my email marketing campaign? Most email marketers target these significant days of the week since they know the results they could achieve. 

Your target audience will receive a bunch of emails in their inbox. The chances of your email getting lost in a bunch of emails are high. Well, as mentioned earlier, each marketer has a  strategy that works out. If you want to experiment with the less competitive days, then you should go for it. 

Mondays might prove extremely useful in improving your performance.

The Device Used By Your Audience Affects The Email Response Rate

Let's say you are sending out emails at 10 am on a Tuesday. According to GetResponse, emails sent at 10 am generated an open rate of 21%. Now you are busy scheduling the perfect email for your target audience. 

This will work best when the people you are targeting are desktop users, thereby meaning they will open your emails at work. Perfect! But what if your target audience opens email using their mobile devices? 

Research has shown that in the year 2020, 81% of email opens occurred on mobile. If your target audience opens more emails on their mobile devices, then you need to schedule accordingly. 

These people are more likely to check their emails in the evenings. We are back to our earlier point; understanding the patterns followed by the people you are targeting will maximize the email response rate. 

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Research has shown that the open email rate has subsequently decreased over time. Does this thing scare you a little? If it does, you would be relieved to know that the open rate has grown considerably after the decline throughout the years. 

This shows that putting in effort in the right direction could ensure the year 2021 will prove extremely good for your business.  

Two Crucial Factors That Affect The Response Rate

We already mentioned the importance of knowing your target audience before sending out emails. 

Let's now move further to two essential things that you need to research to ensure you come across the best time to send an email to get a response.

1. The Age-Group

Let's say you are promoting a newly launched product and your target audience consists of youngsters. When you send emails to youngsters, you cannot expect them to check out emails early in the morning, let's say, 8 am. 

They are enjoying the best part of their lives and probably sleeping till 4. They are more likely to check their emails later during the night. It makes complete sense to send them emails during this time to get a better response rate.

On the flip side, people in their 30s are less likely to check emails during the night. For them, the afternoons might provide better results. If you are still looking for a time slot covering every age group, Mailchimp can help you. 

According to Mailchimp, the best time to reach out to people, whether youngsters or adults, is between 10 am to 1 pm. They have also suggested that the time slot you should strictly avoid is 3 am to 5 am.

These are some insights that Mailchimp's data scientist John Foreman came up with. Over the period, he has observed that no matter how much effort you put in to decide the best time of sending an email, the open rate will fluctuate. 

Still, coming up with time slots that worked well in the past could be highly beneficial to your email marketing campaign. He suggests using common sense to depict the best time to send an email. 

When exactly do you think college students are scrolling through their inboxes? Observe the results and process further according to the same. Foreman also mentions how positive results of the best time to send an email would only be 7% of your emails. 

Depending on the length of your email list, 7% could bring all the difference you need to your email marketing campaign. 

2. Recipient's Location

According to the campaign run by Superoffice early in 2021, the recipient's location affects the response rate drastically. The response rates vary from country to country. 

As we can observe here, the email open rate is the highest in Switzerland, standing at a good 29%, while it stands the lowest in the United Kingdom at 13%.

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One important point to note is that your open rate does not necessarily decide the success or failure of your email marketing campaign. Even if your campaign’s performance is below average according to industry benchmarks, it can still obtain positive results.

This means that the main motive of running an email campaign is to see if it brings you closer to your initial goal.  If it does, don't worry, your campaign is doing great irrespective of what the benchmarks say. 

But make sure you still work on it to achieve better results.  Apart from the open rate, Superoffice also observed the average deliverability rate across different regions. 

Yes, the emails you are sending out might never make it to your subscribers' inboxes.

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Here we can see how the maximum email deliverability rate is in Europe, standing at a reasonable  86.4%.

This is another crucial factor that affects your response rate. Are your emails even being received by the people you are sending them to? Superoffice considered a few things to ensure their emails get delivered to the right people, thereby improving the response rate. 

Firstly, you should always cleanse your list from time to time. What's the point of sending an email to those who don't open it even after 3 to 4 attempts? Remove these people from your list, or your emails will land up in the spam folder.  

Secondly, make sure you go for a double opt-in to ensure people want to receive emails from you. I wouldn't like to be bothered by frequent emails from companies I don't care about. Also, sending such people an email is a waste of time and resources.  

You must ensure that your emails are reaching out to people who are most likely to take action. If not, you are only decreasing your open email rate, slowly drowning your campaign. 

Conclusion

After walking through the top websites' data, we know that what works for one site doesn't work for the other. 

Try out all the time slots and days that provide the best results and decide accordingly. 

Let us know the best time to send an email that works for you.

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