Best time to send out emails
Hi all,
It seems the best time to send out emails is between Monday-Thursday and between 10 am to 12 pm if you maximize for open rates.
This is quite old news I am sure, e.g., I found this article from MailChimp from 2014 confirming the numbers https://mailchimp.com/resources/insights-from-mailchimps-send-time-optimization-system/.
Also, I noticed MailBrew send out their emails around 11 am to 12 pm which strengthens the argument that this is still the best time frame for send-outs.
Of course, it always depends on your audience but would love to hear from your experiences here.
In your experience — have you seen specific times and days that work better? Have you seen any difference depending on the frequency you publish?
In the end, great content is more important but always fun to learn the basics as well.
I think this absolutely depends on your specific audience, as has the potential to vary significantly between them. For example, my products target college students who interact best late on Thursday afternoons. Why? No clue, but it's a substantial difference. I don't think it's wise to generalize things like this if you have a target audience. A product for high schoolers should be timed completely differently from something for doctors from something for IndieHackers, etc.
Agreed,
I see generalisations like this as a good way to get started and then try to drill down into the "why" and test other theses.
How did you go about testing the time for the highest engagement with your audience?
We had a website (covintern.com) running long prior to starting our email list, and we’re using engagement data from the website to guide our first few newsletters. Admittedly, this isn’t perfect either, as web browsing habits are probably somewhat different from email opening habits, but it let us ballpark what time of day our users were thinking about internships. It’s worked well enough (45% open within 3 hours) so I don’t know that I’ll go to the effort to tune it further.
I think trial and error might be your best friend here. I'm still in the early stages of my newsletter (fromdocent.com) so right now I try to send every weekly issue at a different day to see if there are any major learnings. So far Sunday seems to be working well, but maybe it's because my content is more leisure focused. Next one I'll send out on a Thursday and see what the differences are.