The Best Time to Send a Newsletter to Optimize Open Rates

You’ve put love and time into crafting the perfect copy and chose a design that is on fleek, and on brand. Now it just needs to be on time.

You don’t want your newsletters to get lost in the inboxes of your audience. One of the ways to make sure yours gets read is by optimizing the sending time. In this article, we’ll reveal how you can find the perfect time for your audience to complete your email marketing strategy.

Here’s some advice on the best send times if you want to optimize open rates according to the research:

Overall, sending your newsletter emails in the middle of the week is your best bet. Who wants to open a bunch of emails on Fridays? Here is a breakdown of the best day according to 10 studies conducted on the highest email engagement times. 

Timing matters when sending out newsletters and email campaigns to your customers. The time you send your email can affect all kinds of metrics—the most obvious one being the open rate. Getting the moment just right to land in someone’s inbox can drastically increase the chances of them reading your emails. But there are more benefits: 

When optimizing send times for your marketing emails, it definitely matters whether you’re targeting B2C or B2B readers. 

Let’s start with the most obvious example: if you’re trying to reach a B2B audience, you don’t want to email them on weekends only for them to find your email on Monday in a pile of other to-dos and must-reads. And they’re unlikely to open your emails during their weekend wind down, so this would lose you a lot of traction. 

The best time to send email campaigns aimed at B2B is probably during business hours, when people are at their desk and already focused on work.

But if your email subscribers are consumers, and more specifically, working parents, the weekend might be perfect. Saturday morning might be their moment to browse through their emails with a cup of coffee. 

Of course, there’s no guarantee for any claim to the best time for each target audience. That’s why testing is crucial. Individual habits and preferences can vary widely, so make sure to test what works for each audience—or even for individual readers. 

Of course, open rates don’t say it all. You’ll want your email marketing to increase brand awareness, to get people to take action, and increase conversions. Take a look at these newsletter examples that lead the way. 

We all deal with emails and newsletters differently. Here’s what you need to keep in mind when creating your email marketing strategy and figuring out the best time to send newsletter content. 

Understanding who your readers are will give you a lot of pointers to help pick the right send time. Chief Marketing & Growth Officer, Francesca Nuvola, points out that the best sending time “depends on the location, culture, and habits of your target.” 

Here are some questions that help you determine what your audience needs, and when:

Or: ‘’When would you like to receive our newsletter?’’

You can even straight-up ask what your readers consider to be the right time to receive your weekly newsletters the moment they first fill out your newsletter sign-up form. That way, you can optimize email timing right from the get-go. 

Mondays are hardly ever the right time to push new things on people: they’re busy enough as it is. Inboxes are flooded with what’s been lifted over the weekend and then some, and energy is low. 

You want to reach your audience when they are focused and when your newsletter will pop up clearly in their inboxes. Even though you’re eager to send your beautiful-looking news, hold on to it until they actually have time to really appreciate it. 

Experimenting is encouraged when it comes to sending times. Conduct A/B testing with different send times and track how it affects metrics. It might take a while before you find the sweet spot but when you do…

Once you determine the peak time for your audience or different segments, stick with it. People might start looking forward to your content at specific times in their week, and you will want to deliver —this increases brand awareness and strengthens customer relationships.

Keep an eye on the metrics. You might notice that even after finding the right time to send emails, open rates drop. Check if this has something to do with things like seasonal trends, and learn from it so that you can adapt for the following year.

Even on the best day of the week, at the best performing hours, your email campaign can still see low opening rates. That’s because other factors are weighing in too, such as your subject line. Play around with these as well, to find what works best in your subscribers’ inboxes. Then dazzle them with subject lines and newsletter headers that make them want to read all the way through.  

With the right tool, this is a lot easier to do than it may sound—and you can reap some real benefits from it. Check out our free trial to see how easy it is to create beautiful newsletters, measure your campaign’s performance, and how optimize it for your target audiences.

Finding the right time to send your newsletters means you’ll have to look at a combination of metrics—and choose the ones that are most relevant to your goals. Here’s what you can look at: 

Ideally, your newsletter will have some links in it. To further educate or entertain your readers, but also for you to measure how effective your content is. We’ve made it easy for you to find this and other metrics in your dashboard. Here’s a how-to on seeing how your emails perform in Flodesk. 

Open rates tell you how many people actually clicked on your email—the most important thing you want to be measuring. Several things can affect your open rates: your delivery time, subject lines, and how often you send emails. 

With Flodesk, you can automatically resend emails to subscribers who didn’t open your newsletter a day after your first send. Some people simply need a quick reminder!

In some cases, not everyone on your list receives your email in their main inbox. If your newsletters are going straight to spam, this will reflect in your bounce rate. This is an important indicator that you should work on the deliverability of your emails.

We’ve all been there: receiving yet another newsletter of a company we simply have seen too much of or not the right things, and we head straight to unsubscribe. If you’re consistently delivering emails at the wrong time, that company could be you—so make sure to reach out to your audience when it suits them best.

Optimizing your open rates isn’t just about getting more people to read your content—it can directly link to your conversion rates. If you’re linking to any type of product or service, see if you can spot a link between open rates and revenue over time.

And finally: are people actually paying attention to your content? Simply opening your email and checking out after the first line isn’t what you’re aiming for. Low reading times might indicate that your content isn’t up to par. Some experts believe that the ‘perfect time’ doesn’t exist and that it’s actually all about amazing content.

If you’re putting a lot of love into your newsletter, you want as many people as possible to read it. Catering to their needs and schedules is crucial in increasing opening rates, avoiding unsubscribes, and boosting conversion.

With Flodesk, you easily create newsletters that look great and work well. We’re offering you aesthetics and analytics—a killer combo for effective newsletters. With our convenient drag-and-drop builder, you’ll have the perfect newsletter ready to go in no time. Give it a go with our free trial!