Never send email marketing campaigns on a Friday

5 points by cpursley ↗ HN
The title pretty much says it all.

Much lower open and click rates. Higher unsubscribes.

The Mail Chimp does not lie.

9 comments

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Depends on the market. Your results do not translate universally. Plus, who know if your headline sucked. What did you test?
Using the same subject line Monday - Thursday - my open rates were 20% higher than industry average.
Dot compare to industry averges. The control has to be one of your own mailings. Was this your first mailing?

To give you perspective on mail chimps industry average, I never get any less than 60% higher than the average. It's an useless metric.

My experience says that the best days are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
I've had mailings work best on Saturday at 10pm. Go figure.
People do a lot of catch up emails and reading on Saturday. Like I'm doing today : )
More people opening mails doesn't mean a higher conversion. Everyone sends out their press messages on Wednesday (or 1 day earlier or later). People are overwhelmed with e-mails and other types of contents on these days so they will just quickly scan through it whereas in the weekends people have a lot more time to actually read the stuff, try it out, etc.
I've been heavily involved with direct marketing and email marketing for years, I can tell you this is not a rule that is set in stone. Yes, generally spoken, the opening rate is lower on Fridays. But that doesn't mean conversion is lower, too. I've sent mass emails on Saturday evenings that converted like crazy, only to fail miserably the next week at the exact same time.

Plus, if nobody sends emails on Friday because they 'don't open well', you're the only one sending them.

Keep your content quality, relevance and value to the subscriber as high as possible, and the time won't matter.

Hum, I would imagine Saturday would convert better. My best guess is people are super rushed on Friday and thinking about the weekend.