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The time you launch your email marketing campaigns can be a big factor in determining the response rate to your campaigns and hence the leads you may be able to generate.

You spend a lot of time and energy in creating your email campaigns, but if they are launched at the wrong time, then it can sabotage the campaign ROI entirely.

Here I am sharing some of the most important factors to consider in determining the time to launch your email marketing campaigns:

• Day of week: The best days to send email marketing campaigns are Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Mondays are not good because after a weekend more B2B inboxes are inundated and your prospects may very easily miss your email. Fridays are tough too as everyone is busy wrapping up the week and may not have the time to read your pitch. Saturdays and Sundays are usually not the best as most business people don’t work weekends.
• Time of day: This is a tough one as it does matter a lot but its also difficult to determine the most optimal time due to timezones and the fact that emails may go out over a period of a few minutes to an hour depending on the size of your list. Having said that, mornings, just after lunch time and towards end of the day are the best times to target as those are the times when people are not in meetings and most likely catching up on email specifically. Its tough to generalize this one and hence you should consider this but also look at your own statistics from past campaigns to see if there are particular time slots when you see the most opens. If you do, I’d recommend going after that.
• Time of year: Summers are almost always slow with a lot of people taking time off. Other such time periods include long weekends, Thanks Giving and Christmas & New Years week. Its tough to find people at work during these times of the year and hence its recommended to avoid these for launching your email campaigns.
• Caution #1: Give importance to looking at your past statistics more than the above more generalized points. For example, if your audience is startup founders you might actually see a higher response rate on weekends when they are comparatively free and may review your message closely.
• Caution #2: Your email doesn’t go out the moment you hit send. Most email providers send out large email campaigns over a few mins to a few hours depending on quality of service level and so on. So the time you decide is not when the email is delivered. You must take this into consideration.
• Caution #3: Don’t stick to just one schedule. Its important to experiment different days/times and see the results and compare with past results to determine what performs better.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this as well. Please share in the comments below and I will be sure to update the post with any suggestions.

Of course, don’t forget the quality of your email list is always a big factor and you should verify email addresses often to ensure you are reaching your prospects. Click here for a Free Trial of Emailified for your email append or verificaiton needs.