Marketing 2:30 Min read
Email Marketing Guide: What is the best time to send an email marketing campaign?
The answer depends on many factors. However, a good communication strategy offers higher open rates regardless of the time of sending.
When we think about launching email marketing campaigns, two concerns arise: what is the right frequency and the most appropriate time of day to send them.
We have tried to answer this second question in a simple way many times, such as: “Monday and Tuesday at 11:00 a.m. to communicate news and at 4:00 p.m. to generate sales”. Although many of the openings on a Tuesday at 4:00 p.m. will turn into sales over the weekend.
The reality is that the answer varies depending on the region, industry, type of customer, and content being sent. So the most appropriate answer would be: it depends.
In hospitality and other industries, relevance is the winner.
In any sector and most importantly in the hotel sector, communications with the highest conversion rates are welcome communications (to the hotel, loyalty club, newsletter registration), greetings (birthdays, gifts, prizes) and actions that add value to the customer (satisfaction surveys, information about events during the stay), and are relevant at that time, no matter the day or time.
The strategy outperforms timing.
It is true that the time and day can significantly affect individual communication, depending on the type of audience and regions being impacted. For example, northern European countries have a significant drop in openings after 18:00, while in southern European countries this decrease can be observed one to three hours later.
However, an elaborate communication strategy, where the same company sends its communications at the same time, or the same day of the week, will maintain higher opening rates regardless of the exact time of mailing.
Real reservation data vs. campaigns.
As a result of our experience with automated email marketing tools, we can obtain interesting data about when a user makes a reservation after receiving one or more campaigns.
Out of more than 3,000 campaigns sent and analysed over a period of 15 months, around 6,300 reservations have been made. We see according to the graph below that the preferred time to formalise these reservations is between 21:30-22 h.
It makes sense to think that sending campaigns within that time frame will provide us with a higher opening rate and higher return (ROI). Other times, on the other hand, such as first thing in the morning would not be recommended. It’s later in the day that we can achieve a higher success rate.
Once your campaign is launched, it is essential to measure the results, that is, knowing how it has performed in terms of openings, clicks and, above all, calculating the economic value obtained from the reservations generated. In the next articles, we will delve deeper into the analysis of email marketing campaigns.