Often when businesses begin to dabble in email marketing, their main concerns is content, subject lines and offers. And quite rightly so as they are all very important. But there is also another equally important aspect that is often overlooked - when is the best time to send your emails?

The best time to send your emails depends on a number of factors:

• who your audience is
• what your content is
• why you’re sending the email…

There is no magic way of determining the optimum time and day. It simply goes back to good old fashioned trial and error.A general rule

This general rule is the one I use.

I tend to send my emails during the working week. Not everyone is a workaholic so I never send business communications such as email marketing at the weekend.

For me, the best days are Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.

Why not Monday?
Take a look at your own Monday. As it’s the first day back in the office after the weekend it’s going to be hectic. You’re either finishing off last week’s jobs or launching headlong into your new batch of emails.

When looking at your emails you’ll skim them to pick out the most important ones. Because of your huge workload you’ll delete all those which you won’t have time to look at - i.e. the newsletters!

Why not Friday?
This time, you’ll be winding down for the weekend. Your time will be spent frantically trying to finish off those last minute jobs that landed on your desk at lunchtime. There is no time for newsletters and marketing emails now and you definitely don’t want to see them on Monday morning so they get deleted.

Tuesday and Thursday then

This is why I always opt for a Tuesday and Thursday as my best days to broadcast.

That’s not to say people are sitting around doing nothing mid week, but there does seem to be more time to read or at least glance at newsletter and marketing emails. Of course, for this to happen you still have to have a strong subject line that’s going to grab their attention and open your email.

But just because it works for me doesn’t mean it will be right for you. The only way to really discover the optimum time to send your communications is through testing. Try it and test it - who knows you may come up with completely different results to me.

Sally Ormond - freelance copywriter

Sally Ormond, Briar Copywriting, is a professional freelance copywriter, SEO website copywriter and advertising copywriting with extensive experience in both B2B and B2C markets.

To have a chat about how she can help you send an email to sally@briarcopywriting.com or call +44(0)1449 779605.