A movie that has always been one of our favourites. Why? Well aside from *swoon* Tom Hanks soothing voice it’s a great memorandum to the confidence in email. This amazing form of communication bringing people, brands and businesses together. People love to declare “retail is dead” or “read more books” and maybe the latter is definitely right, but we’re all still reading our emails – aren’t we?

Many small businesses and brands are using email more than ever as a way to reach their audience, especially with personalised messages just when it feels right to receive them. Yep, we’ve called it – email isn’t going anywhere in fact, it’s consistently growing globally.

Whether you are a new business or just simply looking for a way to spread your word, email marketing is the way to broadcast.

Email marketing is sending advertising messages to potential and current audiences via email in order to educate, build loyalty or sell a product or service.

And for those using email? Well email is simply a digital marketing means that the consumer “owns”—that is, the owner of the account fully regulates the content and distribution—and normally works best when used to send personal messages to people you know. But more commonly, email owners are receiving more promotional emails every day.

That being the case, email marketing success doesn’t only depend on what you send anymore as we’re getting a bit of everything, right? The competition has made email marketing success also highly allied to when you send your emails.

So, what’s the Best Day of the Week to Send Emails? The short answer from our research: Tuesday. The long answer: It depends on A LOT.

There are studies from email platforms such as Omnisend, Campaign Monitor, Klaviyo and GetResponse which discovered that the best day to send promotional emails or weekly newsletters is Thursday or Tuesday. This is based off their highest open and click through rates. Platforms such as Klaviyo found that even though Tuesday is the winner of open rates, emails sent on Thursdays bring the most revenue per recipient. But interestingly, Monday came in as a close second to these days when it comes to getting high open rates.

Saturday and Sunday fared the worst days in terms of email opens, with the number of emails sent during the weekend significantly lower than the weekdays. For a business, this is interesting as it also poses that there may be opportunity to experiment with your timing and giving weekends a chance, when there’s much less competition from other brands but as the data suggests – are people even reading them?

So, what’s the different between the data finds? Well again, it depends. It is very obvious that the day that accomplishes the best results for one metric doesn’t necessarily generate the same result for another metric. For example, sending an email on a Tuesday might get you a higher open rate but sending it on a Thursday will allow for a stronger click through rate. This is why the decision depends heavily on your conversion targets and the most important email marketing metrics your company is focusing on.

Tip: Keeping in mind that your competition also wants to take advantage of the peak times to send their emails. You can test out different days to find what works best for your subscribers.

Even though you have an idea about what day of the week may perform well for your emails, the detail goes so much further. The time of day you send your emails also has an effect on your conversions. It can make or break the bond with your subscribers. If you’re sending emails at an inappropriate time, you will find a higher unsubscribe rate. But send them at the right time, and you’ll transform subscribers into repeat customers.

So, can you simply test out the times just like we did for days? No! It’s really important with email timings, you are diving deeper and working out who your audience is and what they are doing at what time. This is called a buyer persona. You can ask your business the following questions on behalf of your target audience to try and identify your ideal time to send.

Once you have an idea about the answers, you have an idea of your customers daily routine. You can then put yourself in their shoes and think about when they would have time to read your emails and take action.

In further data by email providers Omnisend, Klaviyo and GetResponse, they found that the newsletters sent during typical work breaks, so midday to early afternoon brought in the best results in terms of open and click through rates. Emails that were typically sent at the end of a common work day, such as during commute hours or later at night also saw a high click through rate.

You may have noticed we haven’t touched a lot on morning send times. Well commonly, although sending a promotional email mat result in a high open rate, it is more often than not that they are lost with emails subscribers had received from other companies or businesses during the previous night – be mindful of getting lost in the crowd.

As a breakdown, we recommend capturing customers during these times:

It’s all simple now, isn’t it? But hold on, what if you have a subscriber base that lives in different time zones. Yep, this is where it can get tricky. There are some easy ways to work around this. Firstly, finding a middle ground when majority of your most engaged subscribers can be awake is the easiest solution – however – you can find you will inevitably be excluding some regions. Another alternative is within your email platform, choosing to send emails based on the recipient’s time zone. If you are using a platform such as Campaign Monitor or Klaviyo to name a few, you will be able to schedule your email for example at 12pm in each recipient’s local time. This is a fantastic feature we would highly recommend, especially during the testing phases of your audiences open and click through rates.

With all the data available on the most profitable send time for emails, it is important to remember that your own audience and eagerness to experiment will truly determine the best hours and days to send your emails. The demographics of your email list should determine a lot of this for you – all you have to do is look and test it! Yes! This means you might send numerous variations at each peak time to see what your list responds best to. Studies and statistics that are online and available to you are great as a starting point to test your email audiences, but they are not always a perfect fit for success. While Tuesday is proven to be best across most platforms, factors such as your own audience and your content may mean Tuesday is actually not right for your own database – but it is a good starting point to test. Good luck!