Included in your marketing campaign you will probably have an email or newsletter component. There are many advantages of sending out a newsletter on a regular basis, however there are also many disadvantages. One of which is getting through the spam filters. Nevertheless, a good portiion of your emails will be received by the consumer, but that  does not mean that your message will be read.

So when exactly is the best time to send out a newsletter to get the most effective response? Are there specific days and a specific time in which you will receive a higher click through rate? Or conversely, are there specific days and times that should be avoided?

Here are a few basic guidelines that you can follow that are pretty much typical to any website.

1. Not on Monday: When people get back to work on Monday, their email box may be full from the weekend. They may not have the time to start to read a newsletter, and on top of that have the extra time to visit your website after reading it.
2. Not on Friday: People may be leaving work early or take Friday off entirely, which means that your newsletter sits there till Monday morning.
3. Tuesday – Thursday: These days are considered to be the best days to get the highest click through rate of any newsletter marketing campaign.
4. Consider your Audience: If you are sending your emails to reach teenagers, then after school hours may work better than between 9am – 5pm. A target audience that performs manual labor jobs usually do not have access to the internet during the day either, so an email that arrives in late afternoon and evening may be better timed.

Lets Get Specifc

If you don’t have alot of data to base your decisions on for example if you are just starting your newsletter you can go with the above suggestions. Otherwise you will achieve the best results with your newsletter marketing campaign by analysing your website and newsletter application data.

Look through your website data, or talk to the IT department that handles the website for your organization. You want to find out when the most active times are for visitors to your website. If you are a one man show, you’ll need to install an analytics program such as Google Analytics on to your website so that you can access the visitor data.

Go through your data and find the most active days that you experience visitors to your website. It will usually always be the same day of the week on average. If you have access to hourly data, then look at the data for that day of the week. So for example, if your website receives the most visits at 10 am on Thursday morning, then you will want to send your newsletter emails at that time. That way, your newsletter will arrive at the best time for when your audience has time to surf to your website.

Other Factors to Consider

Although we often think that email is instantaneous, often it is not. There are often delays from when you press the send button to when the actual email arrives at its intended destination. This is true especially for newsletter campaigns that have long lists of email addresses. It takes time for the email software or provider to actually send out a long list of emails.  You should monitor time period and take it into account when timing the optimal hour to send your email campaigns.

Be Consistent

A very important factor when choosing the best time to send out a newsletter marketing campaign is that it must be consistent. Many people expect to receive a newsletter that they have subscribed to on the same day every week for example. This will improve click through rates as the receiver sometimes will anticipate an email and so mentally set aside time to be able to read that email that day.

Test your Delivery

Lastly, regardless of the time that you think is best after looking through the data and considering your audience, you will want to test your newsletter campaigns different times. Ultimately, your goal is to achieve the highest click through rate as possible. So once you start a newsletter and are sending it out on a consistent basis, you will be able to track the CTR it receives.

Using a split testing technique, you can test out sending your email newsletter at a different time to see what results it achieves. You can take a quarter of your email subscriber list and choose a different time to send out the email to those recipients. That way, you are being consistent to most of your audience but at the same time are able to test other times and days to achieve the best CTR results.