Timing is everything.
This sentence often comes up in life. The more you think about it, the more correct it becomes.
This is especially true in the marketing world, where the right timing can make or break a campaign. A marketing action is always considered in precise timing.
When it comes to email newsletters, timing is crucial. After all, what good is a well-crafted newsletter if it arrives in your subscribers' inboxes at a time when they're too busy/not available to read it?
As a newsletter creator, it's important to understand your audience's habits and preferences in order to determine the best time to send your newsletter.
What kind of Newsletter readers are your subscribers?
- Do your subscribers typically check their email first thing in the morning? or during their lunch break?
- Are they more likely to engage with your content on weekdays or weekends?
- Are they overwhelmed with Monday meetings? Is Wednesday children's day?
- Is January a slow month for your business?…
Do you get it? Timing is everything! And by timing, you need to think about the timing of the day, the week, the month, the season…
In this article, we'll explore the best times to send email newsletters based on industry research and offer tips on how to determine the best timing for your specific audience.
1. Tips for determining the Best Timing for sending your Email Newsletter
Determine your persona
In order to consider your audience's behavior, you need to understand them. You need to determine your persona.
How to determine your persona in the marketing way?
- Conduct research: Gather data about your audience through surveys, interviews, and analytics. Look at demographic information such as age, gender, location, and income, as well as psychographic information such as values, beliefs, interests, and behavior patterns.
- Identify patterns: Look for patterns in the data you've collected. Do they share similar goals or pain points?
- Create personas: Based on the patterns you've identified, create fictional representations of your audience members, or "personas." Give each persona a name, age, job title, and other relevant details that reflect their demographics and psychographics.
Example of 1 persona for the fitness sector :
🏃🏻Active Nikkie: She is a 35-year-old working mother of two who is dedicated to maintaining a healthy and active lifestyle. She enjoys outdoor activities like running and hiking. Nikkie is motivated by the sense of accomplishment she feels after a workout and values convenience and efficiency in her fitness routine.
🗨️Tips: Regularly updating and refining your personas as you gather new data can help you stay in touch with your audience's evolving needs and preferences. Once you've created your personas, ask some subscribers who fit it when is the best time for them to read a newsletter.
Try an A/B testing to determine the best time to send a newsletter
The best way to determine the optimal send time for your audience is to conduct A/B testing by sending the same newsletter at different times and analyzing the results.
To analyze an A/B test and determine the best time to send a newsletter, follow these steps:
- Define your goal: What do you want to achieve with your newsletter? Is it to increase open rates, click-through rates, or conversions?
- Choose two different times to test against each other. Make sure to send the same content to each group.
- Decide how many subscribers you want to include in your test. The larger your sample size, the more statistically significant your results will be.
- Send the first version of your newsletter to one group at one time and the second version to another group at a different time. Make sure to track your results using a reliable email marketing platform.
- Analyze your results: After your test is complete, compare the performance of each group. Look at metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversions to determine which time was more effective. If the difference is statistically significant, you can confidently conclude that one time is better.
- Refine your strategy: Based on your results, adjust your newsletter sending time accordingly.
It's important to note that A/B testing should be conducted over a period of time to account for external factors like holidays (unless it is a will related to your business).
Consider the time zone of your subscribers
⚠️Always consider your subscribers' time zone when choosing the send time, unless all your marketing efforts are wasted.
Different time zones also mean different countries hence different cultures. You have to do a lot of research before sending out the newsletter, it's quite an art!
You need to separate your subscribers by geographical area and plan the sending to that accurate timing. 🕐
🗨️Tips: Name your sending group with the location as “group 1/South Corea UTC+9”.
2. How to pick the best time to send a newsletter?
This part of the article paints a general picture, you need to apply to your specific persona.
Time of day
Sending email newsletters during normal business hours, such as 9 a.m. at 6:00 p.m., is considered "optimal" because recipients are likely to check their inboxes.
The morning may be the best time of day to send marketing emails: 10 am ranks highly for open rates in a number of sectors.
- MailChimp suggests 2 pm as the optimal send time based on their data.
- 4 pm can be a very effective time to send an email. For example, research from SendinBlue showed good email campaign results between 3 pm and 4 pm. This is often the time people check their inboxes as they begin to complete their assignments for the day.
➡️ 3 highlight moments: At the beginning, after lunch, and at the end of a working day.
What about Night time?
Some people do feel inappropriate, and unprofessional to send marketing emails late at night. It’s usually better to send out your email campaigns during the daytime. The immediate deletion rate of the email will be higher.
Days of week
Monday
Monday is definitely not a good day to send a Newsletter. For many reasons!
The emails have been piling up for a few days. People catch up on Mondays and scan what's most important in their inboxes. What's the first thing they do? Delete emails like newsletters! They don't have time to peruse a newsletter while sipping coffee…
In any case, people are not in the mood to read a Newsletter on Mondays!
Tuesday & Thursday
Most of the data on this shows that newsletter open rates peak on Tuesdays. Monday is over. Tuesday is an active working day on Thursday, people are most engaged. Business Newsletter is more welcome on Tuesday and Thursday.
Wednesday
For some countries, Wednesday is the child's day because school is off. You need to check it before sending your Newsletter.
Friday
If people take long weekends, they're usually out of the office on Fridays. In general, people don't have the energy to read a newsletter on Fridays. They are already planning your weekend!
Week vs Weekends
Consider what effect this may have on the recipient. Pollution.
Weekends tend to have low open rates, so most marketers avoid them.Sending on weekends is the same case as sending a newsletter at night. The email will go under a pile of other emails received on Monday morning.No noticeable positive effects, unless of course your product is related to the weekend.
Conclusion
- The best time to send is during work hours.
- The best days to send emails are Tuesdays and Thursdays.
- Avoid sending emails during weekends or late at night.
- Always keep in mind your audience and the geography you are targeting.
It's crucial to remember that the optimal timing for one audience might not be suitable for another. Your newsletter likely caters to a specific audience with distinctive preferences. Thus, aligning the delivery time of your newsletters with their expectations is essential.
