Email & retention
Is there a best time to send marketing emails?
The short answer
Not one that works for your whole list. Send time is about your individual subscribers, and the old advice to send on Tuesday or Thursday at 11am or 2pm has made those some of the most crowded slots in the inbox. Test a range of hours and send each person when they're most likely to open. The exception is a recurring email that goes out at the same time every week, because that trains people to look for it.
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Why doesn’t the old advice work anymore?
Everyone followed it. For years the standard line was Tuesday and Thursday, 11am or 2pm. It’s been so widely touted as the best time to send emails that it’s now the time when everyone sends.
So your carefully timed campaign lands in an inbox next to every other brand that read the same blog post. You’re competing for attention at exactly the moment it’s hardest to get.
So when should you send?
Send time is about your individual people. Each of them has a time they’re most likely to open, and it won’t be the same for everyone. Some of your subscribers read email first thing with a coffee. Some check at lunch. Some only get to it after the kids are in bed. Pick one send time for the whole list and you suit one of those groups at the expense of the rest.
That’s why the answer is to test. When a brand I work with wasn’t convinced its early-morning send time was right, we set up test sends at different hours in Klaviyo to find out.
How do you test send times properly?
Change one thing per send. Send time is the variable, and everything else stays the same.
I saw this go wrong on a launch email recently. The send moved from 7am to 11am, and at the same time the email got a whole new style. The results changed, but nobody could say whether it was the time or the design. We’d changed too many things for it to be a blind test.
My suggestion was simple. Do a resend the next morning at 7am to everyone who hadn’t opened. That gives you something to compare against the old send time, without waiting for another campaign.
This is the order I’d follow:
- Keep the design, the offer and the style of subject line the same.
- Split a campaign across a few different hours.
- Compare open rates and click rates for each slot.
- Repeat it over the next few campaigns before you trust the result.
- Send each subscriber at the time they’re most likely to open.
When does a fixed send time make sense?
When it’s a ritual. A recurring email that goes out at the same time every day or every week works differently from a one-off campaign. You send this email at this time, every week, and that gives the database a bit more conditioning to get them opening something.
It could be a new release every Tuesday at 10am. It could be a Sunday 7pm wrap-up for your insiders. It could be a short note from the founder’s desk that you write a week ahead. It can be as simple as that.
I’ve seen that work across pretty much every industry. Predictable sends lift habitual opens, and that helps the health of the whole account.
When I reviewed one brand’s email strategy recently, a recurring send like this was the missing piece. Once you’ve picked a slot for yours, leave it alone. The whole point is that it turns up when people expect it.