- [Instructor] Email marketers
often like to ask the magic question,
when is the best time to send email?
But what they really want to know
is when is the best time for my audience to receive email
in order to increase the chances that they will read it.
And the short answer is it depends.
If they're like most people,
they're already facing a flood of email,
so how do you figure out what's the best time
to send your email messages?
First, let's think about timing a minute.
Timing means more than the time of day.
It means the day of the week,
and for some audiences, what time of the month or year.
Let's break these down a bit.
What's the best day of the week to send an email?
Most research currently says Tuesdays and Thursdays.
And if you work a regular business work week,
and think about your Mondays and Fridays, this makes sense.
What's the best time of day to receive an email?
The current research says that email open rates
peak at 8:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m., and 5:00 p.m.
if the recipients
are working a quote unquote normal business day.
This makes sense if you think about it.
The first thing in the morning and right after lunch
is a great time to check up on email.
The rest of the day sort of gets eaten up
with work and meetings.
But what if your audience isn't typical?
What if they're remote working entrepreneurs
or yoga teachers?
Here's where your audience research has to come into play.
You have to know something about who they are
and what their normal day looks like.
And then you watch the data and decide.
What's the best time of the month to send an email?
There's no solid data on this.
What I can tell you is that you'll have to do some research
and here comes that tip again, you got to know your audience.
If a good portion of your audience
are parents with children,
you know those months when the kids are out of school
are probably when you'll get the worst engagement rates.
Here's my number one rule for optimizing timing.
Use the data you have.
Any email service like MailChimp or Emma
will give you reports that tell you
when your emails are being opened and read.
This is the first place you go
to see what's currently happening.
If you're getting amazing read and open rates already,
but you want to improve the timing,
try a different day of the week,
or even an A/B split test
where you send half of your audience the email on a Tuesday
and half on a Thursday,
and do this a couple of times
to see what gets better results.
The next rule for optimizing the timing
is to use your email services tools to optimize.
Your email service can give you options
for sending your emails
at a time when your audience's data
shows that they're paying attention.
And don't forget that your audience
may not be in the same time zone that you are.
In fact, they're probably not.
Here's an example from MailChimp
where you can see that the service
will deliver the campaign at the time you set,
according to the recipient's time zone.
So no matter where in the world your audiences is,
if you know that 9:00 a.m. is the optimal time,
they can receive your email at 9:00 a.m.