The Best Time of Day for Marketing EMail Delivery: 9:00am (MarketingSherpa)

Renowned marketing advice site MarketingSherpa.com is famous for their case studies and comparative tests on all sorts of marketing tactics, especially email campaigns. An article just posted there addresses the age-old question of what time of day is best for delivery of email marketing campaigns.

This is a question I get often. The answer is generally a judgement call, and I have always advised clients that overall, midweek (Tue/Wed/Thu) is best - and morning is best. Monday is, well - Monday... and Friday is least likely to get attention, as everyone is distracted with weekend planning. I would always freely admit that this theory of mine is simply experience (business web traffic is generally highest midweek) and common sense.

Much of the answer to this question differs a lot based on the audience you are marketing to. I dont think the above works when marketing to consumers, as personal emails will do better evenings and weekends. I've also noticed that business contacts I have that market to us "solopreneurs" ofen send on Sundays (a quiet day when we all tend to catch up on email correspondence). The MarketingSherpa study described here addressed a combination: an e-tailer attempting to reach consumers at work. Here's a nutshell summary of MarketingSherpa's verdict:

Test returns produced a clear winner -- 9 a.m.
The clickthrough rates for each:

*  9 a.m. performed 15.63% better than 4 p.m.
*  9 a.m. performed 9.4% better than 12 p.m.
*  12 p.m. performed 6.9% better than 4 p.m.

Click here to view the whole article (open access until January 29, 2008)