As I have covered time and time again, email marketing is still the best source of targeted traffic you have at your disposal whenever you need a quick burst to send to an offer or just a new article you have written. These are people who like your content to the point that they have signed up for your specific email list because they want more from you. Let’s talk about when i the best time to send emails to your list.

When is the Best Time to Send Emails

When it comes to sending out emails to your list, these will generally fall either into the autoresponder or broadcast category. Autoresponder emails are those which someone receives automatically just for signing up for your list and this can be a great sales funnel and money maker for you if you tie in the right offers while simultaneously establishing a relationship with your subscriber without your having to lift a finger.

Broadcast emails on the other hand are those which you can send out to your list or a segment of your list anytime you want.

Whether you’re talking broadcasts or autoresponder emails, the question remains the same; when is the best time to send emails to your list? The best time is obviously when you can maximize your subscriber pool’s interaction with your email in order to get the highest percentage possible of your list to open and click through that email. So how do we identify this perfect time?

Niche to Niche

First, and you may not want to hear this, but it varies from niche to niche and consequently list to list. Think about it, if you’re sending out fitness related emails, someone may not be inclined to open an email which offers ab exercises while they’re at work. They may be more likely to do those exercises later at night when they’re home, but if you send that email in the middle of the day they may forget about it by that night. It makes sense that emails related to certain niches are going to perform better at different times of the day.

Therefore…

Test Test Test

You can never test enough, regardless of what you’re doing. Email marketing companies like Aweber make tracking your email analytics as simple as possible so that the stats are right there for you every time you send out a new broadcast. Try segmenting your list into as many groups as you like (assuming you have enough ACTIVE subscribers to get a worthwhile analysis) and send out the same message to each group but assign each group a different hour.

Then just check the results to see which time got the most opens. You can go one step further by taking the couple best performing times and with your next message try breaking those two hours into segments of 15 minutes. In other words, if you found sending your email at 12 noon worked well, you’d then create a segment of subscribers you’d send your next message to at 12:00, one for 12:15, one for 11:15, and so on so you have all times around noon covered to get an even more precise idea of when your opens and interactions are maximized.

Check Competitors

When you’re not getting conclusive results from your own testing, think about signing up for some email lists from other webmasters in your niche. Make a note of the various times each of them send you their emails and specifically look for any overlap between when you receive emails from multiple webmasters to make note of so that you’re basically letting them do the heavy lifting/testing for you. The more lists you can “test” in this way the more conclusive your results will be but remember to take these results with a grain of salt.

Location

Finally, just a reminder to keep in mind your subscribers likely come from all around the globe, so you may want to break them down into segments of regions so that you can designate they’ll all get it at the same time once you finally hone in on a time you feel good about sending emails from.