What’s the worst time & day to send emails to your list?

In a post-GDPR landscape will open rates and engagement increase for your list subscribers? After all they have said they WANT to be emailed, so it should be higher than before. But I don’t think it’s going to make much difference.

Take a look at the Get Response survey for 2018 and you’ll see they pretty much sum it up:

What’s the best time to send emails? Whenever your audience thinks it is.

So hold on… you mean to say the best time is when it suits the reader? Great, but how do you do that? I guess you could ask them and let them choose.

I see more and more bigger players offering options to tailor how often to receive emails, Medium for one, but I don’t see them offering the option of when to receive them. Let’s face it, if I subscribe to a list that is work related then I’d like to receive it when I’m at work, but offers on airport parking for my next holiday just end up being an annoying distraction when I’m at my desk. Even worse they act as a reminder my next holiday is an age away.

Tools to help

The issue then is when to send emails and we can see that all of the major Email Platforms offer some help with this to varying degrees.

Custom scheduling

Most allow you to specify the time to schedule an email to be sent and for a sequence also the interval between sends. Some even have advanced scheduling rules to avoid certain days.

Split testing

Many email platforms offer A/B split testing so you can find out, amongst other things the best time to send emails. It’s great to optimize based on the subject line or the content, but unless the tests are providing individual subscriber data that you can act on, not much help for delivery timing.

Time zones

A few platforms offer “time travel” as a feature. So you set the time and they adjust it to the subscriber’s timezone. This is great, but it still means you are guessing when each particular subscriber would prefer to receive your emails.

List optimization

Some mailing platforms have optimized delivery settings for your list, but they’re not looking at individual subscribers, most are looking at the list as a whole. When is your list most actively engaged on average. Mailchimp claims to have this, but it’s not very clear to me how it works or what exactly it does.

Subscriber optimization

Get Response comes close to really helping with a feature that analyses individual subscribers and automatically adjusts delivery time to increase your open rates. But again, it’s based upon past interaction and doesn’t really know what will be a good time for a subscriber in the future.

Conclusion

Any time you choose as a time to send and email is probably the worst time.

Until we can offer a way for subscribers to set exactly when they want emails, we’re just guessing. This is a painful waste of our efforts as mailing list owners and it’s letting down our subscribers. They want our content, we just don’t let them say when they want it.

The only people who can optimize the delivery time are the subscribers themselves.