As a B2B marketing consultant, I’m often asked what day of the week is the best day to send promotional email. In earlier days of B2B email campaigns, the school of thought was that the best days were Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday. On Mondays business people are overwhelmed and had a email inbox full of spam from the weekend. On Fridays people have their mind on the weekend and didn’t have as much time to read email.
Then, in 2008, Morgan Stewart, research director at ExactTarget, an email marketing firm, was quoted in Fortune magazine in an article titled “Sunday is the New Monday.” Stewart said “The best day to email is when no one else is doing it.” The article went on to say that Sunday was a day when business people have the time and space to read email, often from their smart phone.
Both arguments seem logical to me. Mondays and Fridays are not the greatest for email. I receive fewer emails on Sunday, and I notice Sunday emails more than the emails I receive on weekdays when email volume is higher.
However, the best answer to the question, “What is the best day to send B2B marketing emails?” is specific to your particular target market(s). When I was President of the Institute of Management Consultants Southern California, I noticed that we got more responses to emails on Friday afternoon. That’s often a time when consultants are in their offices finishing up from the current week and preparing for the next week. Clients usually don’t want to see us late Friday afternoon.
Find out the best day and time to email by trial and error or by primary research. Use a program like Constant Contact that tracks the email “read” time and day to find out what your target prefers. You can also simply observe when you get the most replies to your emails. Interview your customers, prospects and colleagues to understand when they review and read email. If the answers allow you to identify a better day of the week for email, send your email on that day. Then track the results to see if there is an improvement in responses or email reads and click-throughs.
What have you found from your B2B email marketing campaigns? Have you been able to identify a day on which your email read and/or response rate is higher? What day is it and whom do you target? Please comment below….
Photo by Stefan Baudy on Flickr, CC BY 2.0
