Are you sending out emails but getting no response? You may be sending them at the wrong time.
Figuring out the best time to send an email is an art form, and it’s one that every email marketer should master.
In this article, we will be taking a look at:
- Data from several studies done on the best day and time to send an email
- How to figure out the best time to send your own email campaigns
- Tips for creating and launching an outstanding email campaign
Let’s get started!
Link building cheat sheet
Why Does Sending Time Matter?
Time is of the essence when it comes to email campaigns.
After all, if you don’t send your message at the right time, it’s like sending a message in a bottle and hoping it will reach the right person – it’s not likely to happen.
Sending emails too early in the morning may get lost in the shuffle while sending too late in the day might mean that your message goes unnoticed.
The goal is to find the sweet spot between the two and make sure your message is seen by the right people at the right time.
Think of it this way: If you sent an email to a person in the middle of the night, you can guarantee that it won’t be opened until the next day (if at all).
That’s not exactly the best way to start a conversation.
On the flip side, sending your message too early in the day might mean that the recipient is too busy with other tasks, so they won’t see it until they’re done.
You want your emails to be seen when they’re most likely to be opened, so timing is key.
What’s the Best Time to Send Email?
Let’s go for the short answer first.
Statistically, 11 am has been determined to be the best time to send an email, according to a study of 20 million emails by Hubspot.
However, that’s just the short answer, and the reality isn’t as black and white as it may seem.
Let’s take a closer look at some other studies and what they have to say.
Siege Media has looked specifically at email outreach (excluding newsletters and email blasts) and determined that the best times to send these types of emails is either 8-9 am or 1pm.
Coincidentally, these are also the times people start their average workday and return from lunch break, thus more likely to check their inboxes.
GetResponse, on the other hand, conducted a similar study and got a rather surprising result: according to them, the highest open rate across the world was actually around 3-4 am.
This only reinforces the importance of considering your recipient’s time zone when preparing your outreach campaigns.
Another study we want to mention is one done by SuperOffice. In their data, open rates peaked at 3 pm.
So, with so many studies showing wildly different results, who do you believe?
You have to consider that each study was done with a different audience, in different niches, at different times of the year. Additionally, there are more factors that contribute to open rates than just the time at which your email was sent.
This includes:
- Your email domain health
- Your subject lines
- The actual content of your email
- The quality of your email list
- Whether the outreach is cold or warm
So, take these findings with a tiny grain of salt, and find the “golden middle”.
Generally speaking, sending an email throughout working hours is fine. However, you’re more likely to get yours opened if you send it anywhere from 10am-2pm.
The Best Day to Send an Email
Now, let’s take a look at some statistics on which days are more likely to yield the best email results for your outreach marketing campaign.
The answer to this question is a bit simpler than the previous one.
A study by Backlinko indicates that the open rates throughout the week are more or less the same – with only a 0.14% difference between the “worst” day (Monday), and the “best” day, which is Wednesday.
This coincides with GetResponse’s study: except theirs shows a slightly bigger difference of 0,73% between Thursday and Friday.
The verdict?
All week is good for sending email campaigns except for Saturday and Sunday.
The differences in open rates are minimal and should only be taken into account by those of you aiming to get the absolute most out of your outreach efforts.
For the average link building email, however, you can get great results by just sticking to the 10am-2pm schedule.
What’s the Worst Time to Send an Email?
Now that we’ve established what the best time to send an email is, let’s take a look at the absolute worst time to send an email.
And that is anything that’s outside office hours, especially during the weekend.
People just want to enjoy their personal time off, so don’t waste your time and effort trying to reach out to them during that time.
How Many Emails Should You Send Per Week?
The number of emails you send per week can also have a massive impact on your open and reply rates.
More specifically, the greater the number of messages you send from a single email, the lesser your email engagement rates will become.
Why is that? After all, it seems logical that the more people you reach out to, the more of them will see and reply to you.
There is a phenomenon called domain reputation that you need to be aware of.
The higher your domain reputation is, the more likely your emails are to actually be delivered to your recipients’ inboxes rather than their spam folders.
The more emails you send in a short period of time, the greater your chance is to trigger spam filters or even manually get flagged as spam.
Respona actually comes with an email health report feature that runs daily checks.
It assigns your sender emails a health score based on its presence on common blacklists, DNS records, and Spam Assassin.
Over the past couple of years, we have delivered almost 85 thousand emails:
Our conclusion is that the ideal weekly number of sent emails should be limited to 250 per account.
That’s just 50 emails every day.
More than that, your domain reputation starts to decline.
Of course, if you have a large lead list with thousands of prospects to contact, sending your campaign at this pace is going to take forever.
This is why we recommend splitting the load between several email accounts, each limited to no more than 50 daily messages.
This way, you’ll both be able to send a large number of emails in a reasonable amount of time and keep your domain reputation high.
Key Takeaways From Recent Studies
There seems to be little to no consensus between all of the email-sending time studies.
Well, if there’s one thing that’s certain, it’s that the best time and day to send an email isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.
Whether you’re sending outreach emails, digital marketing information, or an email newsletter, the open rates and engagement across different industries can vary wildly.
So how do you figure out the ideal time and day to send your emails? Well, it could be a case of trial and error.
Start by learning about your audience and subscribers – do they tend to have a different work start time?
You’ll also want to understand the time zone differences – are you targeting local or global markets?
After that, you’ll want to launch an A/B test to see what works for your own email sending times.
But don’t forget, getting a high open rate isn’t just about sending emails at the perfect time – there’s plenty more that goes into a successful marketing email campaign.
How to Find the Best Time to Send Your Email
Now, let’s take a look at some of the exact things you can do to figure out a sending time that works for your outreach campaigns.
Learn Your Audience
The first step is to research your target audience.
Researching your audience is an essential step in figuring out the best time to send them an email.
To begin your research, you should start by gathering data about your target audience. This can include demographic information such as age, gender, location, job title, income level, and interests.
You should also look into their online habits and preferences, such as the times of day they are most active online and the types of content they engage with.
Once you’ve collected this data, you can use it to create a personalized schedule for when is the best time to send them an email.
For example, if your audience is mostly young professionals, you may want to send your email during the morning hours when they are most likely to be checking their emails.
Alternatively, if you’re targeting older adults, you may want to send your email in the evening or on the weekend when they are more likely to have the time to read and respond to your message.
A good idea is also to review your email analytics to see when your past emails have performed best.
This will give you an idea of what times of day your audience is most likely to engage with your emails, and you can use this information to refine your email schedule.
Track Your Campaigns
This may seem like basic advice, but you’d be surprised at how many junior outreach teams forego this process.
The two most important metrics you need to keep in mind are, of course, your open and reply rates.
A low email open rates may indicate one of several things:
- Your email timing is off
- Your email subject line failed to catch their attention
- Your email ended up in their spam folder
- Your pitch was irrelevant to the person you reached out to
And a poor reply rate indicates that even if a person opened your email, your actual content wasn’t strong enough to elicit a response (such as a lack of a good call-to-action or poor relevance).
A/B Test
A/B testing is a great way to figure out the best time to send an email.
The basic idea behind A/B testing is to create two different versions of an email and send them to two different sets of people. You can then measure the results of each version and determine which version performs better.
When it comes to determining the optimal time to send an email, you can use A/B testing to test two different times of the day.
You can then measure how many people opened the email along with the click rate of the link in the email. This will give you an indication of which time of day works better.
You can also use A/B testing to test different days of the week.
You can choose two different days and send the same email to each group.
Again, you can measure how many people opened the email and how many people clicked on the link in the email. This way, you can find out which day your audience is most active.
Tips to Launch an Outstanding Cold Email Outreach Campaign
We’ve already mentioned that there’s much more to a successful email outreach campaign than simply picking the perfect time to send.
Let’s take a look at what these things are.
Find the Right Prospect (and Contact Email)
Before you even start your campaign, the very first thing you can do to ensure a high open and reply rate is to find relevant prospects.
This means not just finding “an email” at the company you’re reaching out to, but “the email” to contact.
So, for example, for link building campaigns, you need to target SEO and content managers, for a transactional email you want to target higher-ups with actual decision-making powers, and for collaborations, it’s best to target marketing departments.
Respona makes this exceptionally easy.
It comes with its very own contact finding algorithm that you can tailor to find the exact employees you need, based on their position and seniority within the company.
Just enter the desired positions and seniorities into the corresponding fields and let the tool do its magic.
And, as an additional failsafe, you may also enable the tool to assign generic emails like “[email protected]” to increase the success rate of your searches.
After the search is finished, you may review its results, re-assign contacts, or even run additional manual searches of your target domains and even specific names.
The best part about it?
Respona is entirely cloud-based, so you don’t have to sit and wait for the contact search automation to be done – instead, you can start working on another email marketing campaign or switch to a different task.
Craft the Perfect Email Sequence
Your actual email sequence is arguably more important than the time at which you send it (unless you’re thinking of outreaching on a Saturday, of course).
With Respona, you can craft an email sequence that gets people to reply quite easily.
In addition to several built-in email templates, of course, you have the full ability to create and save your own sequences.
The first step is to come up with a solid subject line. This might be your only chance to get your prospect to click on your message, so don’t whiff it.
A solid subject line should be short yet straight to the point, while providing the user with enough context to immediately guess what they can expect after they open your message.
For example, in the screenshot above, we used “Suggesting content ideas” as a subject line for a guest posting pitch.
It checks all of these boxes.
Next, the actual body of your email.
It needs to be relevant and have a strong incentive for your prospect.
Have a look at the full template we used:
Hi {first_name},
Would it be ok to send over a few topic ideas for your blog?
I’d love to do keyword research and find what terms your competitors are ranking for, but {Website_name} isn’t.
No strings attached if you didn’t like the topics.
P.S. Here’s an example of one of the guest content pieces I’ve written recently: (Example content URL)
(Signature)
It shows genuine interest in puiblishing on our recipient’s website, and the fact that we’re ready to do keyword research to provide topics that are not only useful for us to post, but also help them to close a keyword gap on their website.
Such a pitch is hard to ignore.
Next, the follow-ups.
We recommend to sticking to only 1-2 follow-ups for all types of communications.
If after receiving three emails from you (including the original message) a person still doesn’t message you back, they’re probably not interested in what you have to offer.
So, any further follow-ups don’t increase your chances of getting a response. Quite the contrary – you’re only more likely to get flagged as spam.
We also recommend spacing out your follow-ups with at least 3 business days between each message.
It is also a good idea to connect with your prospect on social media before sending them your email.
Check for Spam Words
Running a spam word check only takes a few seconds, but can save your domain reputation form taking a massive hit.
Besides the obvious “free”, “register now”, “only available for”, and so on, there are hundreds of spam words and phrases that are impossible to remember.
Respona actually comes with its own reply chance estimator that measures your chance of getting a response with any particular message by looking at its subject length, email body length, question count, and, of course, spam words.
Just hit the red/orange/green button (it changes color depending on your current chance to get a response) in the top right corner of the email editor and it’ll pop up.
Personalize!
Nobody likes a mass email blast.
Even if a prospect opens your email but sees that it’s completely unpersonalized and has likely been sent to hundreds of other people, your chances of getting a reply from them are slim.
Even here, Respona can help you out.
In fact, it comes with an AI that scrapes your prospects’ content to find important snippets of information that they talk about.
This is especially helpful for link building, content promotion, and collaboration emails as it helps you craft your message in a way that makes it seem like you actually went through the trouble of reading your recipient’s content.
You can find these snippets on the right side of the email editor.
Just pick the one you like the most, copy/paste it into your email content, and edit the text around it to sound natural.
Just this simple action massively increases your chances of getting someone to reply.
Create a custom schedule
Before launching your campaign, you may choose to also assign a custom schedule to it.
Make sure to take your prospects’ time zones into consideration, and avoid sending emails on weekends.
Link building cheat sheet
Now Over to You
So, after all, when is the best time to send an email?
Whenever your prospects are the most active.
For most business purposes, that time is anywhere between 10 am – 2 pm, the whole work week.
With Respona, you can create custom sending schedules for every single one of your campaigns.
So, if you need help timing your outreach, don’t hesitate to start your 7-day free trial to see all of its email marketing automation features in all their glory!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Is it better to send cold email campaigns in the morning or evening?
It’s best to send emails a couple of hours before your prospects go on their lunch break and immediately after you come back.
Should you send emails on weekends?
No. Sending emails on weekends is the best way to ensure they’re not opened.
When should you NOT send an email?
You should not send emails at any time that is outside office hours, when people are just trying to enjoy their time off.
Is Monday a good day to send emails?
Monday is an alright day to send emails, however, you may have slightly more success on a Wednesday or Thursday.
Should you send emails during holidays?
If you have customers who expect to receive emails during the holiday season (Black Friday, for example), such as a promotional email or special offers, then it makes sense to send emails during the holiday season
However, if you’re thinking of other types of communication such as B2B email or even link building, it’s best to avoid the holiday season.
