Email marketing report - when is the best time to send my email marketing campaign?

Good timing is a crucial element of effective email marketing - getting your message to the inbox at the right time can make the difference between instant deletion and effective engagement.

The ideal timing for your emails will depend on your relationship with your audience and the nature of your content. Once you've run a few campaigns our analysis tools make it easy to track down the best day and time for your audience, but having a starting point to work from can save a lot of trial and error.

With that in mind we've run an analysis of 200 million UK specific emails sent using Sign-Up.to, to identify when recipients are opening them (regardless of when they were sent). We've produced separate graphs for time of day and day of week which are shown below. This analysis disregards the type of email sent, in the near future we'll also be releasing a more details reports for different industries.

What time of day are people reading their emails?

This graph illustrates how email opens are split by time of day and shows that activity is clearly concentrated during working hours of 9am - 5pm with 67% of opens taking place during this time and peak at around 11am. 21.55% of opens occur in the evening hours of 6pm - 11pm but it's clear that most users interact with their email in the office, whether the message is work related or not!

What day of the week are people reading their emails?

Here we again see a bias towards normal working times - Saturday and Sunday both see less then a third of the opens of a normal working day. Midweek (Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday) are the most active days with Thursday slightly ahead of the others, but only just.

Summary

So, for a starting point, getting your message to the inbox at around 11am on a Thursday is a good bet. From there you should watch your individual analytics reports and see if your recipient actions show preferences for other times, and then adjust accordingly until you find the sweet-spot for your subscribers.

Check out our email marketing benchmark report for more useful UK email marketing data.