Mailchimp.com recently published an amazing couple of blog posts describing when to send emails to your mailing list. Mailchimp sends millions of emails per year and they have a pretty decent sample that you can depend on. They publish some tremendous reports that are worth reading too! The question is how to interpret their data.
The first one describes the best time of day when people open their emails. If you follow their advice and send emails between 2-5pm you are surely guaranteed that someone will be in their inbox more often and the chances of your email being read are higher. Being there at the right place at the right time surely must work? Something to consider though is that everyone is doing this and the question comes back to your audience – what do they do? Do you know when your audience is opening their emails?
The chart below indicates that Tuesdays and Thursdays are the highest volume days for email. Is that when you want to deliver your email? Surely a late Sunday afternoon email may be avoiding the fray and allow your recipients to spend more time looking at your offer?
Finally, what time of year talks to seasonality of email. There are some wild swings around the holiday season and around summer. Click on the image below for a larger view of the graphic. The 2012 year is incomplete, but is surely a record one for Mailchimp in terms of volume. The dips around holidays indicates lower volumes, but there is something to be said in timing your efforts around the specific period in your organizations marketing plans rather than just following the massive wave of “holiday shopping”.
Looking at aggregate data is great to get an overall trend, but it is a mistake to generalize these rules for all mailing lists. Each audience is unique and should be looked and analyzed individually after multiple sends of different types.
Taking advantage of this knowledge, tailored to your mailing list specifics will yield the best return on your email marketing.
