Open Rate: Best Days for Email Marketing Opens

March 27, 2014

Which days do you usually send out marketing emails? Everyday? Every other day? Once a week? Have you ever thought about how your marketing email open rates can be affected by the day you choose to send out the emails?
Based on the results of a recent study by Red Base Interactive, we can narrow down which day of the week people are most likely to open your B2B marketing emails.

What is the best day for B2B Email Marketing Opens?

Before answering this question, it’s important to understand what open rate actually means. Your open rate is the percentage of recipients who opened and looked at an email. Open rate can be calculated using the following formula:

OPEN RATE = EMAILS OPENED / (EMAILS SENT – BOUNCES)

The Research:

Red Base Interactive surveyed 6 different companies and ranked each day of the week on a 1 to 5 scale to determine which is the best day to send emails. The ranking system is set up so that “1” represents the best days to send emails and “5” represents the worst days to send B2B marketing emails.

The Reveal:

As you can see, Tuesdays received the lowest score (10), followed by Wednesdays (13) as a close second. This means that the best day of the week to get people to open your emails is TUESDAY.

The Reasoning:

So we know that Tuesdays are the best days for email marketing opens, but why is that? Think about the average business persons’ work week…Mondays are usually pretty hectic. People need to plan out their work week, catch up with their own clients after being home for the weekend, and deal with any work that was left unfinished the previous week. With that in mind, it makes sense that business people would have more time to open emails from other businesses on Tuesdays and Wednesdays once they got through the Monday shuffle. On the other side of the spectrum, Saturdays and Sundays were ranked as the worst days for email marketing opens. When people are at home and out of the office on the weekends, they’re not as concerned about checking their emails, let alone willing to spend their two days of free time worrying about what your company has to offer them. Long story short, let people relax on the weekends and wait for them to get through the always-dreaded Monday before you send out your marketing emails, especially if you are looking to improve your open rates.

Keep In Mind:

1. Open rates are influenced by the attractiveness of your subject line. Red Base Interactive found that 64% of recipients open emails based on the subject line alone. In other words, open rate is really a rating of how well you wrote your title.
2. Open rates depend on the deliverability of your email. This has to do with bounce rates: there may be a percentage of the total emails you sent out that could not be delivered to the recipients’ inboxes due to a high spam score or an incorrect email address.
3. The formula for the best day of the week to get people to open your emails as reported by Red Base Interactive is representative of the data they collected. However, it’s still important for your business to experiment, track and review to determine the best formula that works for your email marketing efforts. You may discover that another day of the week generates higher open rates for your business.  For example Saturdays yield surprisingly high open rates for us.

We would like to thank Red Base Interactive once again for sharing their research in “The Best Days and Times for Email Marketing” report.

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