The best days and times to send email marketing to SMB´s
To be short and sweet: The ideal time to send B2B ecommerce marketing emails is 10 a.m on Wednesday. However, there may be other considerations that are more important.
Here is a quick outline of what you need to know to create your email marketing schedule:
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As long as you stay within the 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. window, the variations are slight. Almost all studies show that the highest open rates come from sending in the morning, around 8 to 10 a.m. Both Hubspot and MailChimp agree on a peak time of 10 a.m.
Opens drop off radically when the send is at noon. If you miss the morning for some reason, there is another bump around 3 p.m. Sunday is the one exception, when the highest open rate is at 9 p.m.
2. About 25% of openers open within an 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.
3. Tuesday and Thursday are the best days for open rates.
For introductions, announcements and general information that do not require a click through, these are better days to send your email.
The data varies a bit. For open rates, Experian and HubSpot are showing Tuesday is the highest, while Mailchimp, after compiled data from billions of emails sent, concluded that there are more opens on Thursday.
So if the goal is for as many eyeballs as possible to “see” the information, Tuesday or Thursday have a slight advantage.
4. Wednesday is still the best day for clicks and ecommerce sales.
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, also shows that B2B e-commerce spikes during the beginning of the week, peaking Wednesday and dropping off.
So if sales are the goal, Wednesday is the day, followed by Tuesday.
5. Other considerations that trump the Wednesday choice:
The differences from Tuesday to Thursday are in the 10 to 35% range and may be trumped by timeliness that creates extra urgency or relevance.
For example, reminders should be sent about 24 hours ahead of an important print deadline for maximum urgency.
If you are email marketing a Friday theater section that deadlines Thursday, a Wednesday send is ideal.
But for a page of “open house” real estate ads, or a big sales weekend, Thursday may be better. For a Wednesday page of home services, Monday or Tuesday will certainly do better than attempting to mail on Wednesday, a week in advance.
As one last 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.”
