What's the best time to send an email to customers? What about push notifications? When should you send those? And how do you go about measuring it all to find out? We dig deep into deliverability, open and response rates to reveal the answers to all your questions
The question on every CRM marketer’s mind is, what’s the best time to send your customers email campaigns? Or when do customers respond best to push notifications?
Many consider that not all customers are the same. And many factors come into play: customer segment, time of year, country, brand, industry, and so on.
But there are still guidelines to follow to optimize the sending time of your campaigns based on when customers are most likely to engage.
The Method
To find the best time of the week to send an Email or Push Campaign, Optimove marketing data analysts looked at three types of metrics:
Deliverability
Open rate
Response rate
To conduct the analysis, data was taken from January 1st, 2022, to July 1st, 2022.
Deliverability VS Open Rate VS Response Rate
In this analysis, deliverability refers to the fact that the message you send lands in your customers’ inbox – i.e., it doesn’t go into spam or junk mail, and/or you haven’t been marked as a blocked sender.
The open rate refers to when a customer opens an email and/or clicks on it. For instance, they can open an email with a voucher you send them, but the response rate would be zero if they don’t use that voucher.
It’s important to note that today open rates are a flawed KPI for determining the success of your campaigns. Since the launch of OS 15 in the fall of 2021, Apple provides less data to senders and falsely reports open rates due to its privacy updates. So, optimizing based solely on opens doesn’t work, and in the analysis, we mainly focus on response rates.
The response rate is measured when one of the KPIs set in your campaign has been achieved. For instance, a customer becomes a “responder” not when they open or click on the email but once they have met the KPI of the campaign e.g., uses the voucher you send them.
The Analysis
To check the time of day customers are most likely to respond to emails, we compared the response rate between two predefined groups: the test and the control group. The test group is the group that receives the campaign, while the control group is those who don’t receive it.
Our goal was to compare the behavior of the two groups to find out if there was a difference between the test group’s and the control group’s response rates.
As you can see in the chart below, emails sent on Wednesday and Thursday had outstanding results. The response rate of the test group was 182% higher on Wednesday than the response rate of the control. So, the difference between the test and control group here is higher than 100%.
In this same analysis, push notifications were proven to be the most effective and efficient on Tuesdays and Sundays.
Findings Per Country
Finding the ideal time to communicate with your customers via push notification varies according to the country your customers live in.
Optimove data shows that the test group’s open and response rate was 276% higher for Hungarian customers who received a push notification on a Thursday than the control group.
Czech, Italian, and German customers also have “strong” days on weekends, as findings show that is when customers have higher response rates. Meanwhile, campaigns sent to Hungarian and Polish customers performed better on weekdays.
Next Steps
The analysis conducted provides insights on an aggregate level. To achieve results on a more personal level, you should create customer attributes.
With a smart CRM platform, you can create customer attributes that provide data on the best day and time to send a campaign. You can do so according to specific KPIs you set in a campaign along with historical customer data.
For example, you can set up a “best day of the week” attribute for clients whose last five transactions were made on a Sunday. Then, schedule an automatic campaign reminding them to shop on Sundays!
Quick Insights
Best days for emails: Wednesdays and Thursdays
Emails: All the top days are during weekdays
Best days for Push: Tuesdays and Sundays
Push: All top days are during the second half of the week (Thursday – Sunday)
Dafna is a creative marketing content writer and editor who produces strategic content for various online industries. With over ten years of professional writing experience, she helps brands grow and increase profitability, efficiency, and online presence. Dafna holds a B.A. in Persuasive Communications from Reichman University (IDC Herzliya).
