Selling email marketing? Try sending at 10 a.m.

Once you have sold an email campaign, you want to know what is the best time to send it. 

If you have been following the reports from Site Impact you already discovered that Tuesday and Thursday are the best days for open rates, and that Wednesday wins for click through rates. 

But what about the best time of day for open rates and conversions?

Should you hit the “send” button in the morning? Lunch hour? How about early afternoon? 

Fortunately, this one has a (mostly) simple answer. 

Site Impact, which sends millions of emails for its white label media partners gave us this information: The ideal send time for  B2B e-commerce marketing emails based on open rates is 10 a.m on Tuesday (Hubspot, Experian) or for B2C emails 10 a.m. Thursday (MailChimp). 

For click-through rates, it is Wednesday at - you guessed it -10 a.m. once more. 

Another factor to consider is whether you will be sending across time zones - it is always 10 a.m. somewhere.  

If you have a change of time zones in your DMA, go for an earlier start rather than a later one, but try to stay in the “after 8 a.m.” range. 

If your most important market is, say, California, and you pick 10 a.m. there the rest of the country – and your prospects – are  going to be in the mid-day email open dead zone.  

According to Site Impact, its better to send early, in the above case, say 7:30 or 8 a.m. in California, that will arrive at 10:30 to 11 a.m. on the East Coast, leaving most of the country more or less in the prime email opening and clicking hours: Weekday mornings, from 8 to 10 a.m.

The key take away here is to avoid the afternoons. Almost all studies show that the highest open rates come from sending in the morning, around  8 to 10 a.m., peaking at 10 a.m.

As long as you send by 8 a.m. in the earliest zone the three hour window will provide time for most of the emails to arrive by 11 am. In the latest zone. 

Opens drop off radically at noon. 

People are not opening email during lunch. If you miss the morning for some reason, there is another bump around 3 p.m.

Incidentally, if you have to send on Sunday, the worst day of the week to send, the highest open rate is at 9 p.m.

Also keep in mind that 25% of openers open within the hour. 

The number of openers quickly reduces as the day continues, so a morning send also allows most recipients to act before the close of the business day. 

Many thanks to SiteImpact.com for providing this data. If you are interested in selling email marketing in your market contact Brandon@sitempact.com.