Even after the development of social media, google ads, affiliate systems and an overwhelming number of other options for marketing your product and service, direct email campaigns are still the best avenue to get the word out. But everyone's question is always, "When is the best time to send my email campaign?"
While there remain many debates on the subject, we found this 2012 study conducted by Experian global information group that gives some insight into this question. And despite all the debates and misconceptions, it turns out that the highest open ratio, click through ratio and transaction ratio across all businesses comes in fact in the evenings and weekends. Maybe that is because everyone tends to send emails during the week and in the morning, as you can see by the volume on the chart.
Check out the results yourself:
According to this chart, a higher ratio of emails are engaged on the weekends than during the week. That might be because of the sheer volume of emails that are sent during the week as opposed to the weekend. Let's face it, we get completely bombarded with emails on Monday morning, so many of them just get swept under the rug. I mean, how many emails can we actually open and read, right? This past Black Friday and Cyber Monday I think I received almost a hundred emails from the collective big-marts like Best Buy, WalMart, Target, Staples etc. (I don't even know how they ever got my email.) So what did I do, "Delete, Delete, Delete, Delete, ..."
But, on the weekends, when I'm sitting there twiddling my thumbs on my iPhone with my daughter at the playground, I occasionally check out those one or two emails that come filtering down the pipeline. Especially if they have a fun twist to them.
Perhaps the same reasoning could be applied to the results from the "Time of Day" study.
I attribute these results to one of two possibilities. Either people are opening more emails on the evening and weekends because they are sitting at home playing Candy Crush on their phones at the time and have nothing better to do or more emails simply get opened when fewer are being sent. And although it may depend greatly on the type of business you are conducting, as in entertainment emails get opened more on weekends and business emails are opened more during the week, it doesn't hurt to look a little bit more closely at these results. And maybe, it would be a good idea to give it a shot and see if it works.
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