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When is the best day to send email? (Take 2)

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Oh the $1M question! 

The Marketing Advisors at Haley get asked this question a lot!  Here is why it’s such a hard question to answer…

Tuesday Afternoon
Recently I attended an educational webinar on email marketing.  One of the points that the presenter mentioned over and over again is that “Tuesday afternoons from 10am-2pm is the single best time to send email.”  I was surprised at his concrete answer to a question that is based on trends, lists, industry, and numerous other factors.

Take a look at these two recent reports:

  1. “Wednesday Hump Applies to Emails Too!”
    This is a headline of one of the articles that I received from one of my email marketing newsletters last week from MarketingCharts.com.  The article goes on to say, “Wednesdays had the highest read and click rates in the second quarter, followed by Thursdays and Mondays, according to an eROI analysis of email marketing statistics. Read rates on Wednesdays were, on average, 27%, compared with 26% for Thursdays and Mondays, whereas click rates were 5% on Wednesdays and Thursdays.”
  2. Another attention grabbing study by MarketingVox.com concluded that “B2B email recipients prefer to receive messages on Tuesday (36 percent) and Monday (33 percent); B2C email recipients prefer Friday (31 percent) and Wednesday (26 percent)” in a Q2 study.

With all these conflicting messages, who do you believe?

My Marketing Advisor Advice
Since trends often vary, here are a few general rules regarding send days for staffing firms:

  • Don’t send first thing Monday morning.  This way your email doesn’t get trashed with the weekend’s junk, overlooked or ignored.
  • Don’t send Friday afternoon (unless you are sending to candidates).  Common sense would tell you that your clients/prospects are wrapping up their weekly work and looking forward to heading out the door for the weekend and not opening new emails.  However, candidate mailings may be more successful on Fridays since many cannot check personal email at work and save job search efforts and email checking for the weekend.
  • Test and review.  Test different days/times of the week and then look at your own reporting.  If you’re using HaleyMail, check out your reports and see if you can identify higher open rates on particular days.  Google Analytics can also show you spikes that correlate with any email that you’ve sent out.  
  • Don’t get TOO hung up on day/send time.  Although it is one factor in getting people to open and respond to your emails, it’s not the only factor.  Subject lines, personalization, clean data, content and other factors all play a significant role to make your email campaigns successful.

For more advice on the best day to send email, check out this past Ask Haley Q&A.

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