Within the marketing industry growth hackers (people whose job it is to manipulate data and code for the best marketing-related conversions) use intricate technical methods to work out the best time to send. But we’re more interested in straight-forward techniques at Minutemailer, given that we’re a platform for small businesses. That is regular entrepreneurs with limited time in which to implement tricky code.

For the small business, the best way to identify when to send your mails is relatively straight forward. It’s a classic case of looking at what you do during the day for common patterns that are probably shared by your customers.

The tale of Polly Lawman

As an example, let’s take Polly Lawman. She’s 33 years old, has a 3 year old child at daycare and works as a bank clerk.

She wakes up at 6.45 (or whenever her child decides they want breakfast and cartoons on TV), grabs the child and heads downstairs for breakfast. While her and her child eat, she flicks through her emails on her phone and checks Facebook.

Polly will be hit by the emails and newsletters that have landed during the night. There are quite a few and her time reading them is limited because she has to keep one eye on her child. It’s probably safe to say that now is not the ideal time to email your newsletter with recipe tips to Polly.

However, an hour later though, the kids’s at daycare and Polly is now on the bus, which takes her half an hour. She’s definitely in need of something to take her mind off her journey so pulls out her smartphone again. Some tasty tips for the evening meal would go down a treat right now.

Polly works through her morning shift, grinding the gears of industry, serving the bank’s customers, being warm and friendly. And at 12.15 she takes her one hour lunch break. She eats and talks to some colleagues for 20 minutes or so, makes a coffee and returns to her smart phone. The process is the same as breakfast — emails first, then Facebook, then Instagram if there’s time.

She’ll review the first five or six emails at the top of her inbox and scan the rest. So if you’re sending a mail that’s hit her inbox anywhere around 12.30 you’re laughing. And, because we do still respond to those inbox alerts when the phone is in our hands, even a mail sent during the last ten minutes of her break stands a good chance of getting some attention.

Her day finishes at 17.00 and she heads back to the bus stop for her return journey, again desperately seeking something to consume on her smart phone. Another fine opportunity to send some appropriate marketing.

So three different times at which Polly is likely to be receptive to mails and, if given the right content, open them. Apply this simple thinking, based on your own common daily habits and you’re looking at a very easy way to plan when to send your emails for the best effect.

During the evenings our surfing habits change, many of us pursuing our own special interests during this time. There’s less pressure from work, or children. While Polly might not be so interested in recipes right now, she could be responsive to a special offer on some new gym clothing, or a new camera for the family trip, or a holiday break.

Special tip: If you’ve an audience split across multiple time zones then it’s best to draw up a little spreadsheet of the key times when you’ll need to schedule your mails according to your own time. A good online marketing platform (ahem, Minutemailer) will let you schedule everything in advance, which makes things much easier.

As we said at the start of this piece, there are some technical growth hacking methods to maximise the effect of your online marketing but often it’s simply a case of thinking logically about what regular people do. Regular people like yourself.