What is the best shipping day and time for your newsletter? You've probably asked yourself that. Not surprising, because more than 205 billion emails are sent and received every day. Timing is key!
Email is here to stay and smart entrepreneurs know it. Your mailing list is the marketing holy grail that no one can take away from you. You are not dependent on whimsical algorithms, the list of 'followers' is always yours, you can save it and take it to another mail system and you can do (almost) anything you want with it.
At number 1: email
In the top 3 of the most important online channels, e-mail is number 1. In place 2 and 3 you will find SEO and SEA. E-mail is mainly used to generate traffic to a website (or shop), to stimulate sales, branding and to attract customers. So you see that your indispensable mailing list is valuable in so many ways. It allows you to make direct contact with people who have already spent money on your business, who are interested in your product or service or at least already intrigued.
When it comes to long-term growth of any business, nurturing and growing the mailing list should be a top priority.
Nice to know
Let's explain some marketing jargon, that's useful before you read on.
What is open rate?
Open rate is the proportion of recipients that opened an email, expressed as a percentage. Other frequently mentioned terms are open percentage or open rate. The open rate therefore shows whether your email has been noticed enough in the recipient's inbox.
What is CTO?
Click-To-Open ratio - the CTO is determined by the number of recipients who open and click through your email.
Example: you send 10 people an email, 4 open the email and 1 person clicks in your email, then you have a CTO of 1 / 4 (x100%) = 25%.
What is CTR?
Click-Through-Ratio - The CTR is determined by the number of recipients that click relative to the number of recipients to whom the mail was sent and where the mail arrived in the inbox. Bounces are excluded. It also does not matter whether the email is opened or not.
Example : if you send those same 10 people an email, 4 open, 0 bounce and 1 click through, then you have a CTR of 1 / 10 (x100%) = 10%.
What is bounce?
That's an email that doesn't arrive at its destination because the email address doesn't exist, is misspelled, a spam filter is interfering, etc.
The best shipping day and time for your newsletter
If you are serious about getting started with your email marketing, you should be sending regularly. Once a week is recommended, but... on which day and time is that best? Of course, the ideal shipping day varies by company and industry, but Thursday generally comes out as the best shipping day these days. On the other hand, emails sent on Tuesday have the highest open rate and CTR. Emails sent on Saturdays have the highest CTO.
The most commonly used shipping times are also split into three peaks. The first is between 7:00 AM and 8:00 AM, the second is between 9:00 AM and 10:00 AM and the last is at 5:00 PM. Emails sent at 9:00 PM have the highest open rate (35.22%), followed by emails sent at midnight.
The open ratio is falling
Here are some averages that are useful to know. Keep in mind that your industry may show different figures and this is therefore a very general average.
- average open rate is 24.63%
- average open rate on mobile is 60%
- average CTR is 3.05%
- average CTO is 12.41%
We receive around 50 emails a day. That's a lot and so it's important that you stand out and take your newsletter game dead serious! Take the Email Marketing Magic Online Course .
Source figures: e-Village Email Benchmark 2019
