At a recent conference, the panel I was moderating was asked “What is the best time to send marketing emails?” It is one of those questions that is often asked of email marketers because there is no definitive answer. It really does depend on the individuals on your list. The only way to get an answer is to test performance of your desired target metric and then select accordingly. For all I know, Sunday could be the best day for your company!

Of course, it has always been pretty meaningless. We have talked for years about how bad it is to blast emails to your entire list, instead advising that emails should be targeted to specific segments to produce much better results and keep your audience more engaged.

Yet identifying the best time to send has always been based on testing performance of an email sent to at best large groups of people on your list. There have been too many possible metrics which could affect the best time to segment on (gender, age, location, job etc). The right time to send emails, of course, is when each individual recipient is most likely to respond: the time when they consistently open and act on your emails.

Getting so granular sounds nearly impossible, especially if you have a large list, but it can be done using recipient time-of-open and click data.

Using an automated technology called Send Time Optimization, which calculates the optimum send time based on a rolling average of times each recipient has opened or clicked on previous messages, messages can be scheduled to an individual one at a time – such granularity in even large lists is suddenly achievable.

For example, Encyclopedia Britannica, saw a 40% increase in net revenue by tying delivery times to historical open and click times.

Hopefully this should remove the need to ask “What is the best time to send marketing emails?”