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The best day to send a B2B email campaign
At Ignition we often get asked by our clients “When’s the best time to send a marketing email?”.
If you search the web the consensus amongst the digital marketing world is that Tuesday is the day.
We decided to test this theory by looking through all the stats of all the B2B email campaigns sent through our C3 marketing system.
The average you could expect from an email campaign is 25.8% of emails sent being opened. If you look at the stats on a day-by-day basis there is some fluctuation around this average:
You’ll see that Tuesday does have an above average open rate, but Friday has a higher average at 27.9%. Interestingly Thursdays have the lowest average open rate at just 23.8%.
Does this mean that your email marketing mantra should be “Send on a Friday and avoid Thursdays”?
Well our answer to that question is “NO!”
There really isn’t enough of a difference between the average open days to make this a planning strategy. In addition, at Ignition we don’t put too much emphasis on opens. It’s too unreliable. Just because your email has been opened doesn’t mean that it’s been read.
For us, the killer stat in email marketing is click through rates as it shows the level of engagement your audience have had with the email. If they’ve clicked on a link in your email it means that they’ve read the content enough to find the link and they’ve found the content of interest to want to click through.
The average click through rate for B2B marketing is 10.6% of opened emails. If you look at the stats on a day-by-day basis the results are far more varied.
The old favourite send day of Tuesday performs well above average at 15.2% of opened emails, but the surprise winner is Thursday with an 18.8% click through rate. Remember we’d written Thursday off as the ideal send day based purely on opens. It turns out to be the clear winner for levels of engagement.
Interestingly Friday, while having the highest open rate, has a below average click through rate. The clear loser is Monday with an average click through rate of 5.1% of opened emails. It seems very few of us take the time to open and read an email on a Monday.
So it looks like Thursdays and Tuesdays are the best days to send emails if you want your audience to properly engage with them and you should avoid Mondays like the plague!
Do we recommend this as a rule never to broken? The answer is No! If you’ve got important news alert, it’s better to send it on a Monday and for it to be timely rather than wait for Tuesday just to get more people to read it. But if you’ve got regular news emails, it’s probably best to go for a Tuesday or Friday.
Tags: C3, Email Marketing, Email Statistics