Determining the Best Day and Frequency to Send your Email Marketing Campaign
The two biggest questions email marketers who are just getting started ask are how often to send emails and when to send email campaigns. These are important questions to answer because no matter how great your emails, if they are sent at a poor time or too frequently or too infrequently, your efforts may go to waste. So let’s break down these questions and see if we can get you some clarity.
Email Marketing Frequency – How Often To Send Emails?
Ultimately, how often you send emails is up to you. Fortunately, though, there are some handy guidelines to help you grasp what would be ideal for your business and email recipients.
Here are a few questions to consider:
- What are you sending? (newsletters, promotions, blog posts)
- Did you promise an email frequency? (monthly newsletters, bi-weekly, or weekly promotions, Tuesday sales)
- Who is your target and are they online often? (moms, busy professionals, students)
Issues with sending emails too often:
- Email recipients will get overwhelmed and stop reading your emails.
- You end up wasting time on the content that no one sees.
- You risk getting your emails flagged as spam, regardless if you got their permission initially.
Issues with sending emails too infrequently:
- Customers will forget who you are and label you as spam –nobody wants that!
- Customers will feel they aren’t getting what they signed up for and will opt-out.
- Email addresses will change and you will end up with really high bounce rates.
Email Marketing Frequency Recommendations
Our recommendation for frequent senders is once a week and no more than three times per week. For infrequent senders we recommend a bi-weekly schedule or a monthly email (good for newsletters). We strongly recommend that you email no less than once a month, otherwise your customer loyalty starts to plummet and your value to the email recipient drastically declines. Do the legwork and make your emails worth your customer reading, every single time! For other ideas on how to get your emails opened we recommend the post How To Improve Email Open Rates.
When To Send Emails
The day you send your emails is just as important as how often you send them. It doesn’t matter if you have the perfect frequency if you send your emails on Saturday when people are outside of the home and office doing recreational activities it won’t get read. When choosing your ideal day to send emails, it’s best to remember a few things:
- Mondays are busy days full of organizing, meetings and scheduling the week. There is less time to read other non-work emails.
- Fridays are tough because as you may well know people check out mentally. They finish up last minute projects at work and start dreaming of weekend plans.
- Saturdays people are gardening, watching football, playing with kids, shopping or other recreational activities. None of the above includes email.
- Sundays have generally been a poor day to send emails due to it being a day of rest from work. However, more increasingly, people are checking emails on Sunday evenings in preparation for the week ahead. Thus, Sunday may be a day worth testing out in your next email marketing campaign schedule.
Best Days To Send Email Campaigns
- Tuesday
- Wednesday
- Thursday
These mid-week days have been generally considered the optimal days to send emails because various research has shown them to have the highest percentage of open rates. If you think about it, it makes sense. Everyone likes mid-week distractions or helpful tidbits. Can’t decide between these midweek days? No problem. You can set up your campaign to test these days. Send to 1/3 of recipients on Tuesday, 1/3 on Wednesday and 1/3 on Thursday and see which open rates are the highest. Or you can send on Tuesday this week, Wednesday next week and Thursday the following week. It’s up to you. Using Auto Responders can greatly help with scheduling your email marketing campaign so you don’t have to keep up with it manually! Automated emails allow you to set up your campaign and schedule them out according to your liking. Read The Right Way to Send Automated Emails to learn more about autoresponders.
Ultimately, how you schedule your email marketing campaign is your call. We have found that creating an email schedule that ‘s consistent and well timed will boost reader loyalty and email efficacy over the long haul. So, choose your days, do some tests and commit to a schedule that works for your brand and target audience.