The Best Time to Send an Email (Research-Backed)

Here's a little exercise for you: Check the timestamps on the emails you've gotten in the past day. What have you found? For me, I noticed that most of my emails, especially my subscription emails, were sent between 9-10 AM, or 5-6 PM.

This isn't a coincidence, either.

While the answer to “What’s the perfect time to send an email to my customers?” isn't an exact science, there are some key findings we've discovered through heavy research, and those times listed above are right in line with what we found. Keep reading to find out the best time to send an email, according to our findings.

Why Email Matters For Your Business

Automated email marketing provides a chance for you to improve sales conversions — maybe even by 14%. It’s a way to send customers unique offers — such as product sales or newsletters updates — with information your reader can’t get anywhere else.

Emails should be personalized with what your customers want to see, allowing you an instant way to communicate with them. Your emails should contain information your customers are interested in learning more about, such as discount offers, business updates, or product/service launches.

HubSpot's marketing email tool allows users to create and send automated emails for free. It also gives you the option to schedule your emails according to the preferences you’ve set. Then, your emails will then be sent to the list(s) of contacts you select.

When you reach this option in your automated email tool, you probably spend some time wondering when exactly your audience would like to receive your email, especially if it includes a limited-time offer. You want to make sure the highest number of customers possible are reading your emails. We'll go over what we found next.

When is the Best Time to Send an Email?

When it comes to what time and day you should send an email and days, we found some researched-backed best practices.

These numbers are from GetResponse, an email marketing software that combed its data to compile a report of email marketing benchmarks. They analyzed 4 billion emails from 1,000 active senders.

Image Source

The highest line of the graph represents the open rate. The purple line (i.e., the one below it) represents the click-to-open rate. Below that, the dark blue line, represents the click-through rate. The almost transparent data counts the number of messages sent in percent value.

Keeping your audience in mind is a good tip for figuring out the time to send your emails. If your buyer persona is a professional with a nine-to-five job, sending emails during their ideal downtimes are the best. For instance, HubSpot sends emails between 8-9:30 AM ET to match our audience's daily routines.

If you're sending emails that include a sale or promotion, try sending them during the times your audience tends to take their lunch breaks.

Just keeping up on daily routines isn't the only metric that factors into marketing emails. Others, such as click-through rate (CTR), click-to-open rate (CTOR), and open rate (OR) are also helpful to look at when creating emails.

Click-through rate

Click-through rate refers to the number of people who open a link or image in an email. This number will always be smaller than the open rate of emails opened due to the fact that it's calculated using the total number of emails sent. CTR reflects conversions through email. So if you send 500 emails and 250 are opened, but only 75 links are clicked, your click-through rate is 75.

Click-to-open rate

When comparing the number of people that opened your email and the number that clicked on any links, that data is called click-to-open rate. This metric helps you identify which information in your emails is relevant to consumers. Finding CTOR is done by diving CTR by the open rate and multiplying it by 100%. For example, if your email receives 200 clicks and 120 opens, your click-to-open-rate is 60%.

Open rate

The open rate, then, is the percentage found from the number of subscribers who opened your email campaign. Emails that have great open rates have short, effective subject lines. Plus, they're optimized for previews and preheader text.

This gets into the best day to send through an email. CampaignMonitor collected data from millions of emails used on their service. They put together the best day as it pertains to data collection.

Image Source

From this data, it looks like the best days for seeing a good blanket of success fall during the workweek. People are mostly opening and reading through emails in the middle of the week. It's also good to keep in mind the lowest unsubscribe rate: during the beginning of the week.

CampaignMonitor also reported that Marketing and Advertising is one of the top industries that see success with email marketing, so making sure those emails are memorable is key to delighting customers.

Email marketing can be a tricky subject. There are so many industries taking advantage of it in their own way and making an impact. How do you measure up?

Your subscribers are already interested in your content. They appreciate what you are offering as a company, and as long as you're sending them emails that relate to that, you have a good chance of obtaining great metrics.