Emails Sent Late at Night Get Best Open and Clickthrough Rates

There is no end to conflicting research and data about what day and what time to send your email campaigns. This is mostly due to the large difference between different audiences and their behavior. What works best for one list may not be best for the next. That said I am always intrigued by the research available and today I want to share data gathered in 2012 by Experian CheetahMail of its North American client’s email campaigns.

Charting all the various email that was sent based on the time of day it was sent there is not a significant increase in open rates across the several time periods. There begins to be a larger increase when looking at click rates but no matter how you slice the data it is clear that from 8pm to 12am is the most successful time to send email campaigns for both open rates and click rates. See the below chart published by eMarketer:

best time of day to send email campaignsLooking further into the data you can see that higher open rates and click rates lead to far higher revenue per email and higher average order size.

Experian also released data specific to the best day of the week to send email and the changes YOY to various measurement metrics. Read the full write up on Experian’s site here: http://www.experian.com/cheetahmail/email-marketing-quarterly-benchmark-study-q4-2012.html