Selling email marketing? What’s the right day to send?

So you just sold a client on email marketing, gathered the content, wrote a great subject line and are ready to go. So what day should you send it to get the best response?

We asked Site Impact to weigh in on what the research is showing. 

First, they said, decide on the client’s goal. There is a difference between the best days to send for the highest open rate and the best days to send for the most conversions. 

For open rates, Tuesday and Thursday are the best days to send. 

So for branding messages, pick one of these days. There is a marginal advantage on Tuesday for B2B and a marginal advantage on Thursday for B2C based on Site Impact’s proprietary data and research. 

For example, Hubspot and Experian, B2B marketers, show the highest open rate is Tuesday, while MailChimp, which has a lot more B2C data – literally billions of emails sent - claims Thursday is better. 

In any event, stay away from the weekend. 

On the other hand, if the client is more interested in conversions, Wednesday is the better day for clicks and conversions - by far. 

Wednesday’s emails can get a magnitude of 5x higher for B2B direct response, that is, people scheduling appointments on the phone.

As email marketer Sendblue describes it:

“Ecommerce, SaaS companies, and NGOs… All three of these industries have spikes for the open volume on Tuesday and Thursday. But, if you look at the click volume graph below, you’ll see that the largest amount of clicks by far takes place on Wednesday.”

Another email marketer, Sendio, compiled similar data, it shows that B2B e-commerce spikes during the beginning of the week, peaking Wednesday and dropping off (see image at the top of this blog). 

So if e-commerce sales is the goal, Wednesday is still the day, followed by Tuesday. 

So think Tuesday to Thursday where differences are in the 10% to 35% range. Avoid the weekends, since most people open email at work. Sunday is the worst day of the week to send a marketing email. 

To make things more complicated, other considerations may still trump these choices. 

Put another way, the differences from Tuesday to Thursday are only in the 10 to 35% range, so they may be trumped by timeliness that creates extra urgency or relevance.

For example, reminders should be sent about 24 hours ahead of an important deadline, such as a sale. 

As one more email marketer, Jilt, put it, after studying the data, “While Tuesday and Thursday perform the best, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday aren’t too far behind.

“If there’s something unique… that makes Monday a better day to send your emails, don’t be afraid to send that day.”