We are often asked when the best day or time is to send email. As discussed in a previous post, it really does depend on your company and customer personas. It’s important to test to find what works best for you.

On the topic of time of day, it can be interesting to take it a step further if you have the data available to you. If your ESP (email service provider) allows you to export and filter through email engagement data, create segments based on time range patterns. In a manual example, this would encompass opening up engagement data in Excel and filtering based on a time range for the given metric.

Side Note: The first instinct would be to filter based on time of open. While you should test this, you may find better results filtering based on time of click or conversion. You want to deploy to your subscribers when they are in a position to act. For more complex products/sales-cycles, this won’t apply as much. But for consumer retail products, it will be good to test.

In this example, you would see how many people (opened or clicked or converted) between 2-4pm, 4-6pm etc. This can get as granular as you have time for. Start slow though and test. Group the larger of the time windows you determine and test sending to them at that time with your next send. Make sure to document and monitor results so you can make informed decisions on testing allocation.

Testing can be fun, but it’s important to consider scale and resource availability. In a post from July 2009, we discussed this testing equilibrium in greater detail.

For time of day (or day of week) segmentation and testing, we ultimately want to provide a better experience to our subscribers. If we can do this, along with provide relevant content, we will increase the longevity of our subscriber relationships and provide stronger results to our email efforts.