Email blasts may seem like the out-of-touch old fogey of online marketing, but there’s a reason they keep hanging around: They still work. But that doesn’t mean most businesses understand how to get the most out of them. One of the biggest, hardest-to-answer questions has always been: When is the best time to send out messages? Finally, we have some hard information.
As an editor at a number of publications over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to maximize the effectiveness of email newsletters. And I’ve ended up in endless discussions of what time would be best to send them out. And there are literally millions of articles on the Web trying to answer that question.
Should it be early in the morning so the email is waiting in recipients’ inboxes when they first log on? Or maybe at lunch time, when people might be more receptive to reading it? How about on weekends, when there might be less competition from other email? Everyone has a theory, but no one seems to really know.
This Infographic from GetResponse sheds new light on the question. The email marketing company claims to have analyzed 21 million messages to track open rates and click-through rates (CTR). There’s a lot of information here, but the bottom line seems to be that sending messages at “8am – 10am and 3pm – 4pm can increase their average open rates and CTR by 6%.” And that after 24 hours, the average email open rate approaches zero.
Who knew?
