When Good Enough Shouldn’t Be: The Best Time to Send Emails

When is the best time to send email? This question has been one of the most-asked in the email marketing industry for well over a decade. And the urgency to answer this question correctly has only grown.

That’s because we live in a time-strapped world where we only want things when we want them. But when we’re ready, we want them immediately. In the meantime, email messages are coming in all day, every day—largely without regard to when customers are most interested in reading and responding to them. It’s a mismatch that leads to frustration, disengagement, and opt-outs.

Thankfully, this doesn’t need to be the case. Brands have more data and tools at their disposal than ever to answer the question of the best time to send emails. Patterns in historical open, click, and conversion behaviors are readily available for your each of your subscribers. Taking advantage of that known behavior offers a competitive advantage that will boost performance of your program. In fact, Oracle Marketing Cloud Consulting’s Head of Strategic Services, Clint Kaiser, says that in all of his years of working with clients, he has yet to see it fail to deliver material lifts in a program. Ever.

However, there are several ways to determine “the best time to send emails,” says Kaiser. They vary in terms of the level of impact that they’ll have, but they’re all better than an arbitrary deployment time for your emails based solely upon hunches or how you’ve done it historically. Let’s look at a few data-based approaches to picking deployment times…

>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog