Think you know the best day and time to send your email newsletter?
Ever wonder if your fellow email marketers are all sending at the same time you do?
Convinced your open rate is too low (or amazingly high)?
Some recent statistics pulled from all AWeber users may help you answer these questions:
What Kind of Open Rates Are People Getting?
If you’re sending HTML emails, you probably use your open rate to help gauge your success.
Even though it’s not a perfect measure of whether people are actually opening and reading your emails, it’s useful as a relative measure:
Plus, all other things being equal, it can give you some motivation (if your open rates are lower than other senders’) or satisfaction (if your rates are higher).
So, here goes…
When Is/Was The Best Day To Send?
You’ll often hear (at least, I often hear) that Tuesday is the optimal day to send, because on Monday people are catching up from the weekend, and that on Tuesday morning you’ll have their undivided attention before they jump into their work for the upcoming week.
Do the numbers back up that theory? Let’s see.
The breakdown of open rates by day of the week:
Last month, Tuesday was actually the second-worst day to send, at least if you’re measuring by open rates.
(While we’re breaking assumptions, I should point out this, too: the hour of the day that got the best open rate was not 8-9AM, or 9-10AM, but in fact 2-3PM Eastern Time — email newsletters sent during that hour last month enjoyed a 19.1% open rate.)
Does This Mean I Should Switch My Campaigns To Thursdays?
In a word: No.
In both March and February, Thursday newsletters got the 3rd-worst opens vs. the rest of the week.
I hesitated a little to publish these stats, because I’m concerned that people might flock to sending their newsletters at the day or time that happened to get the best results lately.
Please, don’t drastically change your sending times/days just because you see that the average last month, or any month, happened to be higher on a different day or time.
Yes, you might eventually be able to shift your sending schedule, or split test some broadcasts, but if you up and move everything, you may throw off subscribers who are used to hearing from you at the usual time.
“It’s So Busy, Nobody Goes There Anymore”
To get at the other reason for not shifting your sending based on these stats, let’s paraphrase Yogi Berra (see above).
If everyone switches their sending schedule to send on say, Thursday, then recipients will start getting a ton of email that day, and start paying less attention to each individual email.
One possible reason for Thursday’s success last month may be that it wasn’t as popular as say, Tuesday or Wednesday for sending email:
Those higher-volume days mean more emails in readers’ inboxes, which might contribute to reduced open rates. Following that reasoning, some people may look at the low weekend volume (more email newsletters were sent on Tuesdays than on Saturdays and Sundays combined) and see an opportunity to get their audiences’ undivided attention.
My main point in showing these is to point out that our assumptions about what works are often quite wrong, and that you ultimately have to test for yourself to see what best suits your audience.
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What statistics/benchmarks would you like to see and/or learn more about?
What are your results?
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