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What Is the Best Time to Send an Email Blast?

The email blast is an interesting digital marketing topic that deserves more attention than it gets. An email blast is when you have a long list of recipients to whom you intend to send the same message simultaneously. However, timing is critical to an effective email marketing campaign.

Since you're sending the campaign at the same time, you have to ensure that it reaches the right audience at the most appropriate moment. After all, you want people to open your emails. Hitting send on your campaigns at the wrong time can lead to your emails being ignored, which can hurt your engagement, open rate, and other vital metrics.

So, what's the best time to send an email blast to your subscribers? There are times when some marketing emails might be more welcome than others. For example, weekday mornings often see higher open rates than emails delivered outside those times. Ultimately, the time you should send your emails depends on several factors, specifically your audience.

Best time to send an email blast: The short answer

You can send to most subscribers on a weekday and receive pretty good engagement. Sunday is the best day to send a newsletter or email blast to the fewest number of subscribers, while Monday through Friday are all quite similar in terms of the percentage of email addresses that have that day as optimal.

It's somewhat established that the best days to send email blasts are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday across different industries and audiences. When we look at the typical distribution of optimal send times across Mailchimp’s whole system, the best time to send email newsletters is at 10AM in the recipients’ own time zones. Note that no single day wins hands-down. This is what we should expect when studying the data of billions of humans’ inbox activity.

Unless you have a good reason, I’d avoid sending your content too early (say, 3 or 4 am) in the recipients’ time zones. If you’re on the east coast, but many of your subscribers are in California, consider using Timewarp on your morning newsletter to make sure you don’t send to those west coasters too early.

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Best time to send an email blast: The long answer

We’ve got our easy answers out of the way (send during the work week in mid-morning). So, you might be thinking, "when is the optimal time to send?" Well, it depends on who you are and who you’re sending to. Since the Email Genome Project stores email address engagement data for billions of addresses at the individual level, these send time recommendations are personalized per user based on the subscribers on their list.

While the weekend is less preferable than the work week, that does shift slightly depending on what type of content you send (since that affects your subscribers).

If you're sending campaigns to a general audience, this Tuesday or Thursday mid-morning recommendation might be the best answer. However, every brand and audience is different. So, if we want to find the best time to message a given audience about a particular subject, we need data.

Data collected from your subscribers contains a goldmine of information that can help you determine a few optimal send times for your audience segments. Whether you want to send email blasts to new customers or engage with repeat customers, the right send time can help your engagement significantly.

Why nailing the right send time matters

Globally, 306 billion emails were sent and received daily in 2020-and the number is expected to increase to 376 billion by 2025. Not every email will contain marketing content, but you still have to be as competitive as possible when sending out email campaigns in order to stand out.

While you can send an email blast at the recommended times mentioned earlier, you may not get the best results possible.

As an example, say you send an email newsletter at a time that's not convenient for your subscribers. While your subscribers may want to engage and read your marketing correspondence, they may simply not have the time at that moment. So, they put it off and tell themselves that they'll read it later. Some contacts may be able to read the email at another time, but others may forget about it altogether.

How to determine the best send time for your email blast

We recommend using data to find the best time to send your newsletter and blasts to subscribers. While you can take a quick glance at your data and come up with an average number manually, there are many advanced tools you can use to determine the best send time for you and your contacts.

Mailchimp's Send Time Optimization tool works intuitively based on millions of emails sent and received through our platform. We also take into account the data gathered from your subscribers to identify the right time to send emails.

Send Time Optimization will provide a recommendation for your campaigns, so you can take the guesswork out of your email marketing strategy.

It's also a good idea to A/B test your campaigns. A/B testing allows you to compare two versions of the same email to see which one performs better. With an effective A/B testing strategy, you can easily find out the most optimal email blast send times.

Tips for increasing email engagement

While finding a suitable time to send email blasts is important, it's also essential to format emails properly and consider your audience segments. Your content should be high-quality, engaging, and tailored to its recipients.

Here are some tips on how to write the best email newsletters and blasts.

  • Segment your audience. Audience segmentation is a great way to define the differences between the types of people you market to. Knowing your audience segments takes research, insight, and testing.
  • Craft catchy subject lines. Take the time to write clever and captivating subject lines. It can make the difference between an unread email and a sale.
  • Write high-quality content. Whether you write your content yourself or hire writers, don't compromise on quality. Ensure your content is the best it can be, free of grammatical errors, and written according to your brand guidelines.
  • Create professional-looking newsletters. Your newsletters should always carry a tone, look, and feel of professionalism, authority, and trustworthiness.
  • Avoid content that looks like spam. If your email looks like spam, most subscribers will treat it like spam. This means they may unsubscribe or report it to their email provider.

Optimize mailing times with Mailchimp

Finding the best time to send an email blast can be a challenge. However, getting it right is possible and well worth your efforts. Start by analyzing data from your previous email campaigns and A/B testing. Ensuring you send emails at the right times can deliver results, including high engagement.

With Mailchimp, you’ll have access to several marketing tools that can help you optimize your emails. By using an intuitive and effective set of tools, you can hit the mark every time.

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