There is plenty of advice kicking around the internet about when is the best day of the week to send to your email list.
I’ve found that there is a good chance that this is flawed advice for many people. It was for me based on my analysis.As you’ll see below, it’s not always necessary to follow the commonly held advice of sending mid-morning on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.
It’s not just volume of emails
In the chart below you’ll see a quick analysis I’ve done this week for two of my inboxes. One was my personal email address and the other my work one.
I’ve thrown every email into one of two buckets – Important or Commercial.
Important emails aren’t important in the strictest sense of the word. Rather they are just emails I want to see and action if necessary.
The commercial ones are those that I generally don’t open or read. Even though I’ve called them commercial, they also include emails like social media updates that don’t matter.
So why is it important to split your email volume like this to try and see what is the best time of the week to send an email?
The ones I’ve marked as commercial are pretty uninteresting to me and don’t take up a whole heap of my time. I just plow through them and delete or archive those emails. I don’t need to spend a lot of time acting on them.
The emails that are marked important are different. They are emails I want to receive or read so will take the time to look through them.
As you can imagine, it’s better to figure out the days where the important type email is the lowest as this will be a better predictor of email processing load.
It appears from my small sample that important emails come in heavily on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.
What is also interesting is that they don’t let up on Saturday or Sunday too much. So if I’m not working on the weekend, they are building up to a big Monday.
So by the look of this data, it appears that Friday is the best day to send mail as it has both lower commercial and non-commercial emails yet is a day that most people work.
COnsider your Site Behavior
One other important factor to consider site behaviour.
If you have a look at your Google Analytics, you’ll notice the natural traffic flow for YOUR site. Some sites trend very heavily towards weekdays, and slow right down on the weekends.
This is a reflection of how your users specifically behave and you should aim to move in sync with them.
For AssociatePrograms.com, the day of the week doesn’t matter that much. In fact, you’ll notice from the 30 day sample below, Friday’s are strong for site traffic.
So using these two extra data points, it appears that for AssociatePrograms.com, Friday is the best day to send emails!
As usual, I’m going to back this up with further testing. However, I hope this encourages you to dig deeper into what is right for your audience.
Have you had similar experiences? I’d love to hear your thoughts below.
