The success of email marketing depends not only on what you send but also on when you choose to send them. If we want your newsletters to have an impact, you need to send them when your audience is on their computer or mobile device. In other words, they’ll be most interested to read your content when they are observing their leisure time.
Timing is everything; it can greatly affect your woocommerce b2b email campaign’s open and click-through rates.
This article first tells you the best time to send newsletters according to marketing statistics taken from recent studies. But since every business is different, the same timing may not be right for everyone. This is why we will then show you the best practices to find the right time to send your newsletter!
We consulted a dozen recent studies for this article, published by emailing tools, including Customer.io, GetResponse, MailChimp, CampaignMonitor and HubSpot. We gathered the latest data on the best time to send emails and added our perspective.
The importance of knowing your audience
To answer this question, we need to understand our audience. Each contact list comprises a different group of people with different habits. This is our audience; rather, we must strive to understand it to know what works for it. So our best send time may or may not be the same as other companies.
Marketing numbers give us a solid foundation to build on, but there are no hard and fast rules for sending emails! Define your personas, and you can define the best schedule:
Best days for sending your newsletter
These studies reveal that the days when Internet users will be the most receptive are the following:
- Tuesday
- Thursday
- Wednesday
Tuesday, Thursday, and Wednesday are unanimously the preferred days to send email campaigns because the other days, too close to the weekend, are deemed far too risky by B2B email marketers. The latter seeks to avoid the anguish of Monday (returning from the weekend) and the impatience of Friday (in view of the weekend).
Days to avoid
Consequently, the following days should be crossed off your schedule:
- Mondays: Everyone is busy coming home from the weekend, Internet users are overwhelmed by the emails they have received in the last few days. In addition, weekly meetings are often scheduled at this time.
- Weekends (Saturdays and Sundays): Few people check their work mailbox on weekends, so emails are buried under Monday emails. Weekends, therefore, tend to result in opening rates that are too low to consider that this is the right time.
- Fridays: It’s a bit risky because companies sometimes create specific work habits on this day: some prospects finish earlier, others may have already left for the weekend… So avoid them!
Best hours for sending your newsletter
According to studies, the following timings have proven to produce the best results:
- In the morning, between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m.
- In the early afternoon, between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m.
Some studies also reveal the early evening as an effective time slot, between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m.
Although it may seem obvious, it is generally best to send your email campaigns during the day. You know, when people are awake! But since some of your prospects are still checking their work emails during off-hours, it might be worth testing the waters in the early evening.
Test different times to send your newsletter
If we really want to do email marketing and send our newsletters at the best time to optimize openings and clicks, we have to test!
Key-perfomance indicators for email marketing
Based on studies and what we know about our audience, we will define the KPIs that we need to test in order to call our email marketing a success. One of the best strategies that most experts follow is A/B testing (A/B tests consist of a randomized experiment with two variants, A and B.) and email personalization (deliver targeted personalized messages that drive action using rich customer data.)
Ideally, this would be done on recurring campaigns such as regular newsletters or lead nurturing emails. Here are some of the KPIs that you need to keep in mind before and after sending out your email newsletters.
Open rate
If our email is at the top of the inbox, our contacts are more likely to see and open it, so sending at the perfect time is key to achieving this. Still, low open rates aren’t just related to our sending times. If those aren’t great, consider your subject line as well, since it’s the subject’s job to get people to open your post, to begin with. We talk about it in our article on the best tips for writing an email subject.
Click-through rate
Even if our entire contact list opens our message, we won’t get a decent ROI if no one clicks on the CTA. If we send our message at the wrong time, our contacts may not have time to read it or click on our CTAs.
Make sure your newsletters are sent at the right time
A good marketing automation tool lets you create and send newsletters at scale, manage subscribers, measure performance, and more. With automation, you can design a newsletter email and deliver the email to your subscribers with features like personalization and reporting.
How often do you send your B2B newsletter?
In order to have the greatest possible impact with the newsletters, the important thing is that the sending is regular. The objective is to create an appointment with our audience: every X time, we teach them more about a very specific subject. So set yourself a frequency that you can stick to in the long term!
To the question “What is the ideal frequency to send a newsletter?”, you will be told this: your activity depends on your strategy. The classic options are:
- Weekly
- Bi-monthly (every 15 days)
- Monthly
Beyond the monthly, it may be too far apart for your audience, who will forget you between each mailing. Consumers have signed up to receive these emails, so it’s important to give them what they want! The frequency also depends on your other emailing campaigns: you must avoid over-soliciting your audience at all costs!
Conclusion
We all know how important it is to find the right cadence for sending emails, but it’s not always easy! We’ve created this infographic of the best send times to give you a helpful tool with some proven pointers.
However, headlines such as “best times to send email” like this are eye-catching but can be misleading if you forget you’re addressing a specific audience. There is no ideal sending frequency that works for all businesses. You will have to work on your personas and test the different time slots!
