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Tips and Advice

The Art of Email Campaign Scheduling

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When sending out an email campaign, the hard work isn’t over after you have designed, built and tested your mailer.

There are plenty more considerations to make, with one of the most important being the time and day you send the mailer out.

Mail Chimp studied over a billion emails to find out the optimum time to send a campaign. They found that:

  • After 12pm, email opens see an increase
  • Highest chance of an open between 2pm and 5pm
  • Open rates drop at the weekend

We found that the results can generally be explained by common work schedules:

  • After 12pm, most emails received overnight will have been read so there is more time to read your mailer
  • Between 2pm and 5pm people usually read any emails received after lunch
  • After 5pm most people will be heading home from work and won’t necessarily be checking their emails
  • At the weekend people tend to spend their free time around leisure activities rather than regularly checking their inbox

While these are fairly general rules and won’t apply to everyone, they do give us a good idea of the best time to send out campaigns.

It’s also important to note that these observations may become less relevant as more and more people become ‘switched on’ to their email accounts, through the use of smartphones and tablets.

Despite the research done by Mail Chimp and countless others, the optimum time to send your campaign will all depend on the nature of your business.

For example, if you are a business-to-business company,  sending a campaign at the weekend could potentially harm the open rate. Recipients are much less likely to check their work emails out of hours and the first time many people would see your mailer would be first thing Monday morning (a time when they aren’t as likely to be receptive to sales messages). If your business is customer facing, you may be more inclined to send a campaign at the weekend.

To find the best time to send your company’s mailer, I would recommend experimenting with different campaigns to see when recipients are most engaged with your message.

Once you know this, you can focus on other things such as the quality of your recipient list, the subject line and the actual content of your mailer to ensure complete success of your campaign.

For more advice on any aspect of an email campaign, get in touch with Simon at Platform81. We will be more than happy to point you in the right direction.