The results of your emailing campaigns depend on a large number of parameters: the business type, the product, the message… One of those parameters is the sending date and time. How to choose the best time to send your marketing campaign? What are the differences between BtoC and BtoB? How to define your own best sending time? Let’s see in 3 minutes, how to improve your marketing results.
BtoC/BtoB : what are the best times to send your campaigns?
The best times to send BtoC emaling campaigns
You have a BtoC business:
Your marketing campaign should be scheduled following consumers’ habits.
People mainly open their mailboxes outside working hours and on mobile. To have a high opening rate, you need to ask yourselves the following questions: when are your consumers in front of their mobile screen? When are they more receptive to commercial emails and likely to interact?
Generally, the best times to send your BtoC emailing campaigns are:
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early in the morning: when people are waking up or in public transport
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early in the afternoon: during the lunch break
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around 20 pm: when people are back home after a day work
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The best times to send BtoB emailing campaigns
You have a BtoB business:
The best time to send your emailing campaigns depend on several factors such as the sector of activity, the target’s position…
But it’s highly recommended to send your marketing campaigns at these times:
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between 11 am and 14 pm: these times are the best to interact with professionals because they have fewer demands.
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around 17 pm: senior executives tend to read their mails around 17/18 pm.
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on Tuesday and Thursday: these days are the best to send your emailing campaigns. Indeed, the higher opening rates are reported on Tuesday and Thursday.
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The basic rules
Some basic rules can be applied on any type of businesses:
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you should create a regular meeting: we advise you to ask your users how often they want to receive mails from you. According to the responses, you can send your campaigns regularly (for example twice a month). In that way, you make sure people won’t be bothered by your messages.
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you should avoid Monday and Friday: people are busy at work on Monday. On Friday, they usually work in a hurry to get the job done before the weekend.
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you should avoid holidays periods: on holidays, the professional mailboxes aren’t opened.
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Beyond these rules, it’s possible to define your own best programming schedule. Let’s see how to proceed!
How to define the best times to send your campaigns according to your business?
There is nothing better than testing
All the tips mentionned above are based on general cases. The best way to reach your marketing goals is still to make your own tests. Compare several newsletters by sending them to a subset of your subscribers at different times. It’s necessary to ensure that the testing is done in a regular period (no special events, holidays…). Then analyse the results to send the next campaigns at the right time.
Whatever you do, measure the results
Performance measure is the key part of the process. Some data are more important than the others. Here is the top list :
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the opening rate : the opening rate is the first way to evaluate your newsletter. Make sure that the difference between two campaigns isn’t due to the mails’ subjects. To go further, this data can be mixed with opening hours.
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the click rate : the click rate shows up how much the target has interacted with you and/how much the target was interested to your content.
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the unsubscribe rate : the unsubscribe rate is a good indicator. It helps to know if it’s the right time to interact with your users or not.
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The conclusion
To put it in a nutshell, it’s better to send your campaign during the week. The day and hour depends on the sector of activity and your users’ profiles. If it’s possible, make your own tests by sending campaigns at different times. The results’ analyse will help you to define the best calendar schedule.
You don;t cite where your figures come from. Until recently, I was for 10 years the director of a mailing program for a B2B association, and somewhere I came across a statistic that the day of the week matters. A lot. Our experience was almost to identical to whatever I had read – a 10 am Tuesday send was optimum and by an incontestably significant measure, this was true for us as well. Wednesday and Thursday had lower numbers, but performance was generally OK. Monday was not great unless the message was truly important. Friday was absolutely the worst time (duh.) Your time frame for not sending after 2pm (14:00) is true for any day.
Hi everybody,
some months ago I posted a request for a completely new concept for finding out the right sending-time in the feature-requests. It was accepted but I haven´t heard anything about it yet. I think here is the best place to remind about it.
The problem about regular statistics is it doesn´t evaluate the time of sending. If you regularily send your newsletter out on wednesday on 6 pm, you will have the highest open rate on wednesday evening. So how does it help to know the open-rate but you haven´t anything to compare? And what is the best value you can compare? Here the most important key-facor is:
TIME-LAG BETWEEN SENT AND OPEN
If an eMail is opened in one minute after it was sent, you can be sure you have sent it on the best time ever. And if an eMail is openend 3 days after you sent it, you know for sure it was a bad time-frame. So the most usefull value to track and analyse should be the time-lag between “sent” and “open”.
The great thing is: This value can be determinated automatically and it can be determinated for every unique user. And I would love to see this comming as a completely new statistical concept to AcyMailing.
This would open complete new options for sending out a newsletter. Imagine you have the data for all of your subscribers about when the best time is. And then, for the next newsletter, you don´t specify a time, you specify a time-frame and AcyMailing can sent out the newsletter at the best time for every single user as long as it´s inside of this time-frame. This way, you can sent your newsletter out for one user on the weekend, for the other on during the week and for the next one in the evening, based on the unique stats of every single user. Wouldn´t this be great?
‘All the best, Julian!