When is the ideal email send time and what does Corona have to do with it?
The perfect time to send emails: Anyone who sends emails at exactly the right time attracts maximum interest and is rewarded with higher click rates. Modern marketing automation tools calculate the ideal time for each customer using delivery time optimization — and the Corona pandemic has caused massive changes in patterns here.
Unfortunately, none of this is true. The truth is: For ages (in the digital world that's five years or more), marketers have been sending their emails in the morning between 10 and 11 o'clock and in the evening just after work. The impact of Corona on this behaviour? None!
We see this very clearly in the figures, or do we simply not see anything (new) in the figures. We have already dealt with the topic earlier and found that there is no optimal time to send and that relevance is a much more important criterion. We have now collected well over a million marketing emails from German B2C and B2B companies (thanks, among other things, to our e-commerce studies) and took another closer look at the aggregated data.
The most popular days, times and the effects of Corona
Our initial evaluation shows the fastest send times over the last five years. Two things become clear: First, there are very noticeable peaks in the morning at 9 AM and at 5 PM in the evening (time is standardized to UTC, in Germany it is already 10 AM (winter) and 11 AM CET).
E-Mail send times over 5 years
Frighteningly uniform lines run through the picture year after year — they are unimpressed by something like an annoying pandemic. There are only a few differences, for example, since 2019, more and more emails have been sent in the morning between 7 AM and 9 AM UTC and not primarily at 9 AM. Does this mean that emails are more often read on the way to work? And in 2020, there will be a stronger peak after work at 17:00 UTC. Does this mean that you are no longer traveling after work due to corona and have time to check emails? Our honest answer: Maybe, but it doesn't have to. The only thing that is certain is that marketers love to send emails at 9 a.m. or 5 p.m. (UTC).
But why? Are these really the objectively best delivery times? Do complex split tests across all target groups show that it is precisely in these time windows that most recipients consume advertising emails most intensively? Our assumption is rather: Even senders are only people and act according to familiar patterns. And the delivery peaks roughly correspond to the plans of “Send out the newsletter in the morning before the meeting” and “Get the email ready quickly at the end of the day.” This claim is also supported by our second graph:
In the last five years, most emails have always been sent on the full hour, about half less at half an hour (i.e. the ratio is 2:1). The smaller peaks are the 5-minute intervals, which are easier to set on many platforms than manual input. Our tip: If you want your email to stand out, you should send it at a quarter of an hour — or at 8:56 a.m., because the fewest emails arrive in an average inbox six minutes before the hour.
Finally, the shipping day: Thursday and Friday are the most popular here, Saturday is email-free for many. Here, too, the fact itself is less impressive than the enormous stability over time.
As with send times, the question is: Are these really the best email launch days that have emerged as a result of numerous tests across all industries and target groups? We are once again inclined to the interpretation that email marketing experts are also just people and show a certain herd behavior in their working hours and habits.
A final proof of this: For some time now, email marketing platforms have been advertising with completely individual sending times (SendTime Optimization), i.e. algorithms that determine the best accessibility for every recipient. The highly consistent delivery times we have shown suggest that there has been no paradigm shift in the market — campaign managers still determine when emails are sent — not the recipients. And when you test which send time is best, you are more likely to test the already popular times, such as 10:00 in the morning versus 18:00 in the evening.
