When to email? The million dollar question

There are a lot of ‘groundhog day’ questions within the email world, none more so than “when’s best to send an email?” – day and time. There are of course a number of opinions and suggestions, mainly depending on whether your audience is B2B or B2C.  For example, for a B2B audience, apparently Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are the prime emailing days, based on the fact that people are recovering from the weekends on Mondays, winding down on Fridays and clearly out of the office on Saturdays and Sundays.  Then you should obviously avoid sending on bank holidays, school holidays, Easter, over Christmas and New Year, and so on.  For B2C email marketing, the advice is very different, as people tend to be checking personal emails in the evenings, on weekends or during their lunch breaks and of course over seasonal holidays if the offers are relevant.  It really is a bit of a lottery and totally depends on the nature of your business.

Some of the answers I’ve heard have clearly been with said prospect in mind, yet there’s a new and more recent response that, whilst it sounds brilliant in theory, I’m not so sure. Apparently, you should send an email based on when somebody last opened or clicked within an email. Sounds great, but has anyone ever really sat at their computer waiting for an email because that’s when they last interacted with that specific brand ….”oh dear, it’s late, not having that, delete!”

I would suggest a far better approach is to work based on the logic of what  your business does and, without question, implementing a clear testing process (which should be ongoing, results will change).  Have a read of Mark Brownlow’s blog here. 

By definition, a blog is a web site that allows users to reflect and share opinion. The above is obviously my opinion and I’d be happy to hear others. Any thoughts or insight others care to share? Has anyone tested sending based on recipient interaction with any success?

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