Email Marketing Tip: The Early Bird Gets the Worm

Traditional email marketing best practices will tell you that you should follow these basic rules when sending email marketing campaigns to your list:

1. Send on Tuesday - Thursday

2. Send late morning or early afternoon (11am-1pm)

Now, of course, these are general guidelines and your target audience and the content of the email always factors in to the equation.  For example, if you are sending an email for a Sunday brunch special you definitely want to test sends on Friday, Saturday and even Sunday mornings.

Email send times should vary also and our experience here at Gainesville Marketing is that every day, the "competition" increases as the inbox of your subscribers gets busier and busier.  Email often times is looked at as a chore and met with disdain - people simply have way too many special offers, email chain forwards, work related communications and other email that they *have* to process on a weekly basis.

So how do you cut through the clutter and ensure that your emails get opened?

We suggest one way is to test earlier sends.  We are seeing a trend of improved open rates with send times around 6am:

Email Open Rate Stats - What You Need to Understand

With most campaigns we see these prominent open rate spikes within hours after the send but time and time again, sends between 6 and 7am have resulted in the most prominent spikes.  Our interpretation of this is that more and more of the audiences that our clients are targeting are "early birds" and are trying to get a jump start on the day and knock out email early.

So why not schedule a 2 a.m. email send?

You might have noticed but much of the spam that you receive in your email box tends to hit in the dead of night.  Because of this, we are inherently trained to filter through many of these early morning messages and expect the messages to be spam or irrelevant and unwanted email solicitations.

Have an email marketing question or have some feedback on what has worked for your business?  We would love to hear from you in the comments below.