Choose a newsletter sending time
Choose a newsletter sending time
1. Define your subscribers by identifying your target audience to help you determine the best time to send your email newsletters.
For example, are you catering to a B2B or B2C audience? Business hours are often the best choice for B2B, while lunchtime hours are better for B2C. Use information about your audience to: Formulate strategies based on subscriber habits. A newsletter for mid-level corporate executives will have a different optimal delivery time than a newsletter for freelance copywriters, who don’t have fixed schedules. Assess how much time your subscribers will need to read the newsletter. When will they have enough time to read your newsletters through? A short newsletter may fit neatly into daytime hours. However, a long one may require more time to read. Sending emails after lunch can be a good strategy, depending on your audience.
2. Consider whether your campaign content will resonate with readers.
Different content will have varying levels of engagement. Email open rates are highest for industries like childcare, entertainment, and animal services. If your subscribers rely on your email newsletters for critical information, as may be the case for estate planning and healthcare matters, finding the ideal time to engage them is important. Weekly newsletters should be sent out on the same days so that subscriber expectations are met. For sales and traffic, where the newsletter contents aren’t critical to subscriber needs, finding the optimal time for delivering newsletters becomes more important. Fewer people are looking for the newsletter, so it should be made as easy as possible to access.
3. Consider email etiquette and best practices, and ensure that the newsletter is timely and based on subscriber needs:
In most B2B situations, sending a newsletter out on Monday mornings may cause it to be ignored. Sending a newsletter out on Saturdays can work, but it runs the risk of being caught up in Monday morning’s pile of emails. Sunday mornings can seem inappropriate to subscribers with religious convictions. Try to avoid sending out newsletters on this day. Don’t inundate your subscribers with multiple emails. Sending out more than one email daily can damage your business reputation, and conversions will suffer. If you send multiple emails to your subscribers each week, be sure to space them out.
4. Formulate a hypothesis of the best timeframes and days to send emails.
Use what you know about your subscribers to develop this hypothesis. This will narrow down your time frames. For example: I determine a B2B newsletter aimed at raising engagement is best sent on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 9 AM and 3 PM. In B2B cases, the best times appear to be Tuesdays through Thursdays, during prime working hours in the morning and just after lunch. B2C timing windows vary more, with evenings, early mornings, late nights, and Saturdays all being viable options. Email marketing platforms often enable you to send emails uniformly across time zones, ensuring that they reach subscribers at the appropriate time, regardless of where they live.
5. Using the narrowed-down timeframes, do A/B testing to compare performance on different times and days.
A/B testing will help you find that sweet spot in subscriber habits. Through repeated testing, you can narrow down the best time frame for your newsletters. Testing two time frames and getting similar results may mean that the sample size is too small to be accurate, or the two time frames offer equal results. Deploy multiple tests to figure out which day and time window best meets the end goal of your newsletters.