I received an email from a client recently. She requested that I move their email marketing campaigns to be sent out only on Monday mornings. She linked an online article that stated that Monday morning was prime time for people to read email. There is a lot of discussion about the best days and times to send out an email marketing campaign. "Always on a Monday,” is the mantra of some. The logic states that it is the beginning of the week and you are sending your marketing message when there is not a lot of other distractions on the viewer’s mind. "Never on a Monday,” is the determined chant of others. They would argue that there is so much over-the-weekend email to wade through that your message will not get a good look on Monday.

If you look at the blog discussions on this subject, you can find opinions stacked as high as the moon, literally. I read one marketing professional who actually claimed that she found that the best time to send an eblast depended upon the phase of the moon. (Of course you also had to burn wolfsbane over a candle before you pressed the send key.) The question remains: is there a perfect day to send email marketing to ensure that it gets its best chance to be seen, clicked through and acted upon as opposed to being quickly deleted? The answer rests with your client.

Timing in marketing is everything. (Take a look at last week’s Nailing Post article: Purchasing cycles: the art of good timing in marketing.) The key is to get your email campaign in front of your target market at precisely the time when they are at their wits end and your service offering eases their pain. Or you need to send the email at the moment they are ready to purchase a product just like yours. If you can predict the right time, this is a relatively easy problem to solve. You don’t have to be a marketing genius to figure this out, just be observant and ask a few questions when you are in front of your clients. Here is a list of questions you should try to answer about them.

 1. Do they primarily use their phone or their desktop/laptop to get email? If you notice that they are responding to you via their Blackberry, Droid or iPhone, then a weekend email campaign might be your best bet. It will catch them when they are at home and not being inundated with other emails. If they have to fire up the desktop or laptop to get email, you should consider sending your email campaign during the workweek and during office hours. This is typically when they will be looking at email.

2. When do they respond to you? Is there a time of day or a specific day when they are sending out emails? If so, this is the time to send out your eblast. Some of my clients are morning responders. Some are just before they go to bed at night responders. Some catch up on the weekend. Have you considered dividing your eblast lists into a Morning Group, Afternoon Group, After Hours Group, Weekend Group, etc.? The trick is to send your campaign when they have down time and are able to browse for a while. This can sometimes come at unusual times. I recently read about a company sending out an email marketing campaign on New Years Day. Their response was the largest they had ever received. They had their highest open rate, click rate and sales from their e-commerce site since they had been using it. If you think about it, most of the activity of New Years happens on December 31. People are off work on January 1, but what is there to do… so they fire up the computer and browse the web.

3. What are you selling? Is it time sensitive? Strike when the iron is hot. If you manage a restaurant, send your lunch special coupons out by 11:00 a.m. This is prime time for your targeted customer to ask, "where am I going to eat today?” Don’t send them at 5:00 p.m. and expect the person to remember you at lunch the next day. Marketing does not work that way. You have to make your pitch when the person is feeling the need to buy now. If you are selling health insurance, you know that decisions are made in HR Departments between October and December. If you are in a non-profit and looking for donations, December is the month when people are the most generous. However, August and September are the months when corporations are putting budgets together. 

4. Why not test it? Like most of the bloggers who have an opinion about the best day to send an eblast marketing campaign, we have come up with our best day from trial and error. Given mornings or afternoons, we have found that mornings give us better responses. During the workweek, Thursdays get us the best responses. We have tested it out and find that the RSS subscribers like to get their information on Thursday mornings. The Twitter crowd doesn’t seem to have a preference when we tweet them. The Facebook followers mostly look at our site in the evenings and on the weekends. Sending in the middle of the night lands us a boatload of complaints from the RSS crowd and Smart Phone users. That is our experience. It is not scientific, just practical. And that is my best advice to you. Use some common sense and make your content relevant and you will find that people will look, click and seek out your e-marketing information.

The Best Day to Send Emails by Mark Brownlow                                                                                                   

Cathy Coleman blog                                                                                                                      

Photo by Kutay Tanir