The Best Time to Send Emails to Boost Opens, Clicks, and Sales

Do you want to send emails at the right time so more people read your marketing messages?

If you want your emails to have a big impact, you need to send them when most people check their inboxes. The right timing can largely affect your campaign’s open and click-through rates.

In this post, we’ll share the best time to send emails based on recent marketing statistics.

But since every business is different, the same time may not work for everyone. That’s why we’ll also show you new ways to find the unique email sending times that work best for your business.

Let’s get started.

Best Time to Send Marketing Emails

There’s a ton of data and statistics out there to tell you the best day to send business emails.

Tuesday and Thursdays are the best days to send emails to send business emails. As for the exact hour of the day, these are key transition times that tend work best:

• 8 am is a great way to capture the ones who check emails first thing in the morning
• 1 pm falls during/after lunch break
• 4 pm is when people need a little pick-me-up to get through the last hour of the workday
• 6 pm falls during/after an evening commute

These times are when people are more likely to be active online.

However, you can easily see that there’s no consensus on the exact day or time to send emails.

In reality, these slots don’t always work. Every email list is made up of a different group of people with different habits. So, your best send time may or may not be the same as other businesses.

While these marketing standards give you a solid foundation to build on, there’s no hard and fast rule for sending out emails.

Instead, you need to understand YOUR audience and know what works for them.

That said, having an idea of the global standard of the best times to post is a great starting point. You can then test and tweak your schedule to send out emails at the perfect time.

So first, let’s take a look at some of the statistics that dominated the market over the past few years:

Get Response Statistics

A study by GetResponse analyzed about 4 billion emails sent by their customers between January and June 2019 to gather information on the best time to send to individual email addresses in their local time zones.

The study only looked at active senders with a minimum of 1,000 contacts.

Here’s what they discovered about the best day to send emails:

As you can see, there’s very little difference between any of the weekdays, Monday through Friday. Weekends are not a great option for sending emails, with Sunday only slightly better than Saturday.

From GetResponse’s data, we learn that Tuesday has the highest open rate and click-through rate, making it the most popular day to send emails. Weekends were the least popular days to send emails, and they also had the lowest open rates.

GetResponse also found that 1 pm is a great time to send emails, but also offered 10 am as another time slot with strong open and click rates.

As you can see from the graph above, there’s also an increase in click-through rates right around 6 pm, while open rates fall dramatically between 2 pm-3 pm before rising again.

HubSpot Statistics

HubSpot pulled data from 20 million emails sent over a 10-month period and found that Tuesday was the best day to send an email in terms of open rate. This was followed closely by Wednesday with Monday coming up fast in third.

Of course, as you can see in their graph, the weekdays were all pretty close and the open rates dropped over the weekend.

HubSpot’s peak time for email opens was 11 am.

The only exception is on Sundays when the peak time for open rate is 9 pm.

Intercom Statistics

Intercom, a live chat software that also lets you send automated emails, included both email and in-app communications in their research.

They discovered that emails sent on Tuesdays and Thursdays were opened at a much higher rate than those sent at other times during the week. For in-app communications, open rates are pretty steady on weekdays, with Wednesday, Monday, and Thursday being the top three.

As for the time of day, Intercom found the best time to send emails is between 10 am and 2 pm, regardless of whether it’s email or in-app

Now that we’ve seen a few strategies that have worked for other businesses, let’s turn our attention to how to find the best sending times for yours.

How to Find the Best Time to Send Business Emails

The key transition times we mentioned earlier talk about ‘lunch break’ and ‘evening commute’ as the best times to send emails.

But what if your audience doesn’t have these transition times in their daily life? For instance, if your target market is new mothers, these optimal email times won’t make any sense to your audience.

The best way to find what works for your business is by:

• Studying your audience
• Trying and testing

Studying Your Audience

To understand your audience, here are a few questions you should ask yourself:

• What do you know about your subscribers and their relationship with you?
• Why did they sign up for your emails?
• What do they do for a living?
• What is a day in their life like?
• When are your subscribers likely to be thinking about that content?
• What is the content of your emails?

These are just a few foundational questions to get you started. You can ask questions that make sense to your business and audience.

The more you get to know your audience the better.

This will help find out when your subscribers are most likely to engage with your brand. Plus, when you know your audience, you can tailor your content and messaging to personalize your relationship with them.

Trying and Testing Email Send Times

You won’t know what flavor you like till you try them all! Luckily, with sending emails, you won’t have to try sending emails every minute of the day!

Using the marketing standards, you can schedule emails to be sent on different days and times during the week and then check analytics to see which emails saw the highest open and click rates.

A good open rate will vary depending on your industry, but the average open rate across all industries is 17.92%.

But raw percentages can be misleading. After all, if you have a list of 100 people, 17.92% is only 18 people.

If you have a list of 100,000, then that same percentage is 1800 people.

That means no matter what time you send these emails out, your email’s success will always be limited by the number of contacts you have. That’s why the goal should be to fill your list with as many qualified leads as possible.

Optimizing Emails to Grow Your Subscriber List FASTER

Now that you know how to find the best times to send emails, we want to turn your focus to boosting your email subscribers and getting higher open and conversion rates.

So far, we’ve covered marketing standards and how to understand your audience as a whole. But even inside your audience, not everyone is the same.

People sign up for different reasons and have different interests. We want to show you how to target visitors and segment your subscribers so you can send personalized emails that are bound to get better open and click-through rates.

The best way to do this is using OptinMonster.

OptinMonster is hands down the best lead generation tool in the market to grow your email list exponentially. It lets you create stunning marketing campaigns like popups, floating bars, slide-ins, gamified wheels, and more.

There are 50+ templates and a drag and drop builder that lets you easily customize the campaign to suit your marketing goals.

And here’s how OptinMonster can help you grow your email list faster, find best times to post, and improve your email marketing efforts:

• Use powerful targeting rules and campaign triggers to display personalized and highly engaging campaigns
• Segment your email leads right from the time they sign up to reduce admin work
• Run A/B tests on campaigns to see what works best
• View analytics and performance to optimize results
• Launch subscriber surveys to find out what they want

And much more…

Not convinced yet? Take a look at how SnackNation adds 1200 segmented leads every week using OptinMonster.

Want to get started right away? Sign up for your 100% risk-free OptinMonster account by clicking below:

Get Started With OptinMonster Today!

Now let’s see how OptinMonster helps you grow your email list exponentially, segment subscribers, and get more open and click-through rates.

Here’s a list of what we’ll be covering so you can skip ahead to the section that interests you the most:

• Powerful Targeting Rules and Campaign Triggers
• Seamless Email Integrations
• Audience Segmentation
• A/B Testing and Analytics
• Email Subscriber Surveys

Now let’s show you how to use each one of these OptinMonster features.

1. Powerful Targeting Rules and Campaign Triggers

OptinMonster lets you target your audience based on a number of factors like their interests, activity, location, and more.

Right from the start, you can display personalized offers and signup forms that will get better responses.

And you don’t have to study your audience to do this. OptinMonster has laid the groundwork and covered every rule you might possibly need.

You simply need to select your target from OptinMonster’s list of display rules.

You can even combine multiple rules to target your audience better.

The best part is you don’t need to have any coding knowledge or design skills to set up these high-converting campaigns.

To get a deeper understanding of how OptinMonster’s campaign triggers work, here are a few highlights:

• Exit-Intent® – display campaigns right before someone leaves your site
• Onsite Retargeting® – re-engage with users who have interacted with another campaign
• Page-level – target visitors based on the page or specific URL they’re viewing
• Location-based – personalize campaigns based on physical location of the user
• Referral source – engage with visitors coming from a specific website or social media platform
• Time-based – wait till a user has spent a certain amount of time on a page or schedule a specific date and time
• MonsterLink™ – make campaigns appear when a user clicks on a button or link

…And much, much more.

OptinMonster has a ton of display rules for you to trigger campaigns that your audience will respond to so you can grow your email list faster.

2. Seamless Email Integrations

OptinMonster integrates with all popular email marketing services including Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Aweber, Drip, and ActiveCampaign.

OptinMonster makes it incredibly easy to set up email integrations.

Once you’ve designed a campaign, all you need to do is head to the Integrations tab and select your email provider from the drop-down menu:

Then you’ll need to sign in to your email account. In some cases, you may need to enter your account’s API key and, just like that, your new leads will be sent to your email account.

With the new email integration in place, you can create emails to be triggered as soon as visitors sign up.

So, for example, if you’re offering a lead magnet or a discount if a visitor signs up, the best time to deliver it is immediately after they sign up. The longer you wait, the chances are they might forget what they signed up for.

Instead, you can set up welcome emails with your email service provider to be sent as soon as a new subscriber is added to the list.

3. Audience Segmentation

OptinMonster lets you add custom tags and select email lists to make sure you’re organizing your new leads in the most profitable way possible.

We’re going to show you how this works using Constant Contact. When you connect OptinMonster to your email provider, you’ll see a field called ‘Email Provider Lists.’

This lets you segment your audience as they sign up for different OptinMonster campaigns. You can choose to add subscribers of this campaign to a separate email list in Constant Contact.

So, for example, in Constant Contact, you can create a new list called ‘Newsletter Subscribers.’

Then on the OptinMonster integration page, you can select this list from the Email Provider Lists menu.

Now when a visitor submits their email address through this campaign, their contact details will automatically be added to the Newsletter Subscribers list.

That way, when you’re scheduling or sending an email in the Constant Contact dashboard, you can select the ‘Newsletter Subscribers’ list.

This means your email will go only to the leads that signed up with this particular campaign.

With this feature, you can organize your email list efficiently and optimize conversions from your email marketing strategy.

This method remains pretty much the same for all Email providers. If you’re using Mailchimp, instead of a list, you can create a new tag inside the Mailchimp dashboard.

Then in OptinMonster’s email integration menu, under the List Tags section, you can select the tag you created.

This will save time and make sure new subscribers are added immediately to email campaigns or weekly newsletters.

4. A/B Testing and Analytics

OptinMonster lets you set up two versions of the same campaign so you can see what your audience responds to better.

You could try adding a testimonial or review to see if that builds more confidence and trust in visitors.

You could even test different background colors, images, and calls to action.

Plus, OptinMonster has built-in analytics to give you the statistics that matter.

For every campaign you create, OptinMonster will track the number of visitors that saw your campaign, how many of them converted, and give you a conversion rate as well.

OptinMonster also gives you an overview of your campaign analytics so you can see which campaigns get more engagement.

It shows you which days of the week subscribers are more likely to sign up. You can even see which pages convert the most, so you’ll know which are the best spots on your website to display campaigns.

With these analytics, you’ll get a better understanding of your audience and know what keeps them engaged.

5. Email Subscriber Surveys

The last trick to optimize email engagement is to simply your users when they would like to get your email, how often, and what they would like to see.

To ask them, you can create engaging surveys and polls using WPForms.

We picked WPForms because it comes with readymade templates to set up surveys and polls in a matter of minutes.

It also has advanced features like smart conditional logic to ask follow-up questions based on a user’s answer.

You can then embed these surveys inside beautiful OptinMonster popups and target customers when you feel they’d be more likely to take the survey.

You can even display this survey only to users that have already subscribed to your signup campaign using the Onsite Retargeting® rule. That way, website visitors who haven’t subscribed to newsletters won’t see this survey.

OptinMonster surveys are so powerful that Kinobody converts 73% of visitors with a survey just like the one above.

Learn how to create your own feedback survey or poll following this detailed guide: How to Create a Survey Popup.

Once users fill up your survey, you can access the results inside the WPForms dashboard. You can see individual entries as well as graphs and percentages that will give you a clear idea of when subscribers prefer to receive your emails.

With this, you now have a personalized response that’s unique to your business and you won’t have to rely on generic statistics that may not work for you.

That’s all we have for today! We hope you found this article helpful in finding the best times to send emails to your subscribers.

OptinMonster makes it easy to understand your subscribers and connect with them.

If you haven’t signed up for OptinMonster yet, what are you waiting for? Get your 100% risk-free OptinMonster account now by clicking below:

Get Started With OptinMonster Today!

For more resources to better your email marketing strategy, check out these posts:

• How to Create an Effective Email Autoresponder Series
• Small Business Email Marketing: 7 (Easy) Tips for Growth
• 13 Benefits of Email Marketing: Why (and How) to Grow Your List

We’ve included lots of tips and tricks in these posts to grow your subscriber list and get more conversions through email marketing.