Typically we see newsletters going out to subscribers anywhere to one to five times a month. The majority of newsletter subscribers though will look for and are comfortable with one email per week. This means that your newsletter should have really good content and be able to stand up to the challenge for good open and click through rates.
Employ restraint in your strategy with send amounts. Your situation may require more or less sends. Review of your open rates of your subscribers will determine your optimal send rate.
Weekdays perform marginally better than weekends. Of the weekdays, Tuesday and Thursday are considered the best days for not only open rates, but also clickthrough rates.
All these numbers in the data that we have looked at however is showing nominal (less than 0.2%) difference so depending on your list size it may or may not pertain to you.
Unsubscribe rates do not show any trend up or down relating either time or day of send.
As you can expect the most popular time to have emails opened is during the typical 9-5 work hours as people are in front of their computers and checking not only work, but home email as well. The challenge though for national email lists is the time zones.
Don’t wait until mid afternoon if you are on the west coast. Mid afternoon is the most popular time during this 9-5 time frame, but for the US, that means anywhere from 9 am to 3pm. Look to schedule your sends for 10 am Eastern Time to ensure they are getting in the boxes that day and will be seen and read (if not right away) that day.
If you are targeting the home subscriber – maybe it’s a retail orientated email newsletter, or a fitness gym – then you can schedule for a little later in the day if those on the East Coast are going to get it by supper time. This is where there is an uptake of retail newsletter opens.
First let’s make sure we understand what an open rate is. Here is the definition and formula:
Open Rate = Unique Opens/Emails Delivered*
Note that emails delivered is emails sent minus emails that were bounced.
Now let’s look at open rates as they pertain to your industry. Rates are going to fluctuate depending on who you are going to target.
Those with higher open rates are going to be for newsletters pertaining to personal finance, interest, and family. These will be financial institution newsletters, ones pertaining to a golf club or hobby club that one is a member of. And of course, ones related to health updates (including going forward notices about Covid). These will be in the mid to high 20s percentile.
Ones where one has chosen to subscribe for news about a retail product line will be less inclined to be opened, but temper that with the average of 17-18%, if you are beating that then be proud of your efforts and set that as a benchmark.
The overall open rate if you are wanted to lump them all together should be about 21% in 2022 for an open rate.
Use your open rate as a goal but be cognizant that other metrics are very important to the effectiveness of your email copy which we cover in another article.
We hope this article helps with understanding the best times to send out newsletters to your subscribers. There are many factors underlying your road to success, so if we can help make that road smoother, we are happy to help.
Until next time, keep those emails rolling!
– Jim
Jim Gibbs, Senior Account Executive at Critical Impact Jim Gibbs is Critical Impact’s Growth Channel team lead and has been selling and closing for a long time. Jim is known to be able to sell bottled water to fish.
