Despite its success, email marketing
isn’t always black and white. Questions about send times and email
frequency are never far from a marketer’s mind, and the answers are
often as frustrating as you would imagine: everything depends. An email
send time for a B2C email is entirely different than a B2B email, and
your email frequency often depends on the size of your database, the
purpose of your emails, and the expectations that you set when prospects
or clients are added to your email lists.
Luckily, many email marketing companies collect and analyze
huge amounts of email data so that we can get answers to some of the
most common email marketing questions. Let’s take a look at some of the
most pressing issues surrounding email marketing, and see what the
experts think about each.
What time should I send my email?
The best time to send an email is in the early afternoon, right after lunch (source).
Why? Because emails sent in the morning are forced to compete with the
usual barrage of early-morning emails. On a similar note, emails sent in
the late afternoon risk getting pushed aside as your recipients finish
up their day’s work and head home. Experiment with early afternoon send
times to see if any specific time resonates with your audience. Then,
start trying different days of the week.
What’s the best day to send an email?
The answer to this question varies greatly between B2C and
B2B marketing. If you’re a B2C marketer, your email sweet spot might be
the evenings or weekends, when your email recipients won’t be distracted
by work emails. B2B marketers, on the other hand, want to avoid nights
and weekends like the plague. For a B2B email, Tuesdays and Thursdays
are often the most popular and most effective days for email sends;
however, sending on either of these days also puts you at risk for
greater competition in the inbox. Try sending an email on a Wednesday or
Friday to see what kind of results you get, but try to avoid sending on
Monday since your recipients will still be playing catchup.
How often should I send emails?
Email frequency can be tricky. While you want to send
emails often enough that you stay top of mind, you don’t want to become
annoying. Most of the businesses surveyed by iContact indicated that
they email their entire lists on a monthly basis, and send segmented
communications at least weekly (only 6% indicated that they email their
entire list every day). Using the email marketing or marketing
automation tools at your disposal, you can track the impact of email
frequency on your opt-out and click-through rates. You can also automate your email marketing efforts
based on timing or your recipients’ actions, ensuring that your
campaigns are timed correctly and won’t overwhelm your recipients.
