What's the best time to send an email? It's the multimillion-dollar question we always get asked. But is there a specific time? Does when you send an email matter?

We're Kennedy and Carrie, and you're about to find out the truth about this...

Ready?

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:33) Want to carry on with the conversation? Join our FREE Facebook group. 

(2:17) Is there a universal 'best time' to send an email? 

(6:03) The best time to send an email depends on your email list. 

(7:40) Why you shouldn't rely on open rates. 

(11:35) The best time to send an email is when you'll send that email. 

(16:14) Know your audience. 

(17:52) Create email automations. 

(21:05) So when's the best time to send an email? 

(23:23) Join The Email Hero Blueprint. 

(23:51) Subject line of the week.

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

How To Increase Your Open Rates (They’re Wrong But…)

Practical Ways To Increase The Average Click-Through Rate In Your Email Marketing.

Master Your Metrics – Unleashing The Power Of Email Marketing Analytics.

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and get your readers to click and buy, here's how. This is a list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab it for FREE here.

Join the FREE Facebook group

Do you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber? There's a way! Every business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. You'll find a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This content is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint 

Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then grab The Email Hero Blueprint.

This is (hands down) the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.

Want to connect with Carrie?

You can find Carrie on her website!

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about the best time to send an email) and love the show, we'd appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast.

And please do tell us! What do you fill your working days with if you don't spend time on email marketing? We'd love to know!

Unknown 0:28

Okay, so the multimillion dollar question Kennedy, I know you get this a lot me too. What is the very best time to send an email? And that's what we're talking about on today's episode.

Unknown 0:41

The real heroes. This is the new email marketing show with Kennedy and Kerry. tune in each week and learn the email campaign strategy and what's working right now to make more sales from that email list of yours.

Unknown 0:55

Welcome to this week's show with everything we're about to talk about a day, there's gonna definitely be loads of ideas rattling around in your head. loads of questions are going to pop up about how you actually apply this to your exact business, your audience the way that you like to do things. So definitely come along and have those discussions with us inside of our free Facebook group. Just go to Facebook and search for the Email Marketing Show community and join us it's totally free. Just search for the Email Marketing Show community.

Unknown 1:17

Unknown 1:31

Unknown 1:48

Unknown 1:59

maybe I was born in 84. So yeah, I guess I guess like I

Unknown 2:03

was probably still learning to read a bit slower. That one? Yeah. Yeah.

Unknown 2:07

This is the question that everybody wants to know is that like, I think there's two big questions, we will ask them that want to get into email marketing. That is what's the best subject lines and we already talked about that on every episode of the show with the subject line that we feature which will come up later on, but the other one is like what's the best time I remember when I was first getting started online a little later than you did? That when everyone was like, oh, you should send it out. Like it's got to be 3am UK time because it's great for Pacific I'm like, okay, that's what I mean. And somebody will follow that advice. Did you did you I do remember people saying like particularly good times before we actually get into the science of it.

Unknown 2:36

Yeah, I remember when way back in the day we were all going through just product launch. formula or following Ryan's you know, digital marker lunch plan or or Jonathan micelles advice, Rich's advice, you know, and they would say, well, your best time to send launch emails or the best time to send a cart close would be 1pm Eastern because Eastern is the most prevalent, zip code, you know, the timezone blah blah, blah and that's when you're going to have the best times and so that was the standard advice whether whether or not we agreed with it. That was the prevalent advice I should say.

Unknown 3:05

Yeah, yeah. I think one of the challenges with taking anybody before we actually get into some actual answers, I think one of the tricky bits is if we go okay, the best time of day or send an email is at 4pm UK time all right, if we if everybody does that, what happens is, everybody who's in our worlds gets a whole shit tonne of emails at that time. And that means we're now being bullied among everybody. It's a bit like when you see somebody go and check out other people's Facebook ads, and they go, Oh, I'm going to basically steal that angle or that graphic style or whatever. And now all just blends into one and it no longer works. And that's what happens more and more, especially with this whole idea of like Funnel Hacking being a thing, you know, which I know Russell and team Clickfunnels of all will be really pushing really hard is this idea of go and find what's working somebody else and funnel hack them. And I think people have misinterpreted that as go and do a duplicate and then do a bit of word replacement and instead of saying you know lose weight, you might choose to make jewellery and that's really not what it's about.

Unknown 3:57

Right? Exactly. I think part of the human condition is we want to not be wrong. We want to have the recipe we want to have the formula and we want to know that it computes right if we put this in and then we add it to that, then we know the exact result we're going to get and unfortunately, that's just not always the case.

Unknown 4:11

Do you think there's an element of that I hadn't thought about that like not wanting to be wrong thing but it's also a thing that we're now more than ever because like there's AI be able to spit out so many I'm a friend of mine sent me an app today which will write you a song based on like he wrote my name, the fact that I'm I do email marketing and the fact that I've never eaten an egg which is true, obviously, everything's on the retina. But you're basically and then he told me to create like a big, massive 90s dance song and it's hilarious and good. So we're all able to like put just random words into things and have it spits me out really, really quickly. And I think that's training us all to really search for fast solutions. So if we're all told, Oh, well, the answer is just send your emails at four o'clock and everything will be great. It's faster as well. And it sort of makes us feel like we're getting faster I guess allows us to be a bit lazier and think okay, well, I can take some time off. I'm really considering that.

Unknown 4:58

Yeah, I think we don't want to do the hard work of split testing our own stuff. I think we don't want to do the guesswork. We want to have the shortcut. But I also would say in our own defence, we've been conditioned by the education system to know to believe there's a right and wrong answer. Yeah. And sometimes it's a right or left answer.

Unknown 5:13

Yeah. So let's get into one of the first things I think will be really useful for people to in order to figure out the answer is the best time to send an email to your email list is going to really depend on your email list. So the the best thing, the most practical thing I think people can do is figure out the time that works best for their list. But what I don't want people to do is go cool. I'm now gonna spend the next 24 weeks testing every hour of the day and then I'm going to try all the quarter past the half past the quarter to the 45 minutes past the quarter dues. So that's gonna just take forever. The way that I like to think about it is if you really want to figure this out, I think that the fastest thing you could do is to just test mornings for a bit, test afternoons for a bit test evenings for a bit. And when we say test, for me, the big thing that we need to really, really consider is this needs to be about the number of clicks, not the number of opens, I mean, ideally, this other sales, right? And it'd be like, if I send emails in the morning, do I tend to make more sales then? Okay, I'll do that for maybe two weeks in the next two weeks. I'm going to try sending emails on the afternoon. Does that make the most sales does that mean more sales per percent you know, percentage wise, or doesn't want to do it in the evening? I think that's a really I think it's a sensible test for most of us who don't have 100 million email subscribers, right? I think that's a pretty good one. And then for me, it's about what are you testing what is the result you're looking for sales is ideal, like if you can test based on number of sales. Next Best Thing if that's a bit more complicated, look at the click through rate, but I think a lot of people get the fact that they think, oh, open rates are really the thing that tells us the answer here. I don't think that's the case. In fact, I sent an email this morning. I haven't talked about this actually. I sent an email this morning. I do a split test the subject line. I know what you're not supposed to be like today, but I sent a split test on the subject line. One subject line got a higher way higher open rate with a significantly lower click through rate. And the other one got way low, low open rates unless you're loving it, but the click through rate of those people was way higher. And I think it's really interesting that you could trick somebody into opening an email by using like, you know, your order confirmation or something or something really sneaky. Like that, which you don't even want to do. But really it's about the mindset of the people who are when they go into that email so for me I would never do any tests or get any results based on open rate not to mention the technological falls with open rate reporting these days. Anyway, so I for me, I think it's about morning, afternoon evening, test those three things for two weeks. He put a whole bunch of leads through it and base the winner on sales. Ideally, that's a lot of manual work. Or if you want to look at numbers and reporting a system click through rate is pretty good. Because for me the job of email than how you feel about this carry, but for me, the job of email is yes okay. It's to make sales definitely. But the sales page has to take a certain level responsibility for that. Right? You send the greatest emails in the world to a to a shitty sales page, it's not gonna convert. So the ultimate indicator of a good email for me is the click through rate. If a dictionary is good, and it's obviously not talking about irrelevant, it's like going hey, go buy some shampoo when you get there. It's like dog training. Obviously, I'll be crazy. But I think that's where it sort of all comes down. Yeah,

Unknown 8:06

Unknown 9:02

Yep. Yeah, I think so. I think so. And I think as technology is getting along now, I do want to bring up this idea that obviously open rate reporting is flawed. Some businesses are really seeing an increase in bot clicks in the actual email. So if you're especially if you're selling to if you've got a lot of people who are on your list, who are in corporations, they will often have like, doesn't have a spam detector or some kind of virus detector that will actually go and click the links and go and make sure that that links are legit link. So one of the ways we're getting around it is we're using a bit of technology that basically only counts a click if the person stays on the sales page on the page or the destination page for three seconds because a bots not gonna do that button to click the link to make records right so it's gonna go there, but it's not gonna hang around actually have your page. So there are ways around that. And honestly, we'll keep you informed on the show, as that sort of develops into a thing. It might it might change around we'll probably keep you in the loop on that. I want to talk about what we I think we both felt pretty strongly about about the best time to actually send an email and it's not necessarily morning, afternoon, evening or a quarter past two and I think there's a much more important answer. Yeah,

Unknown 9:57

I think that because you can get caught in the mental gymnastics of well, Kennedy said afternoon is the best time so therefore, I'm gonna send in the afternoon. Oh, but wait, I'm in Texas. Kennedy is in the UK. His afternoon is actually my morning. So does that mean my morning is the best time or my peoples afternoon is the best time and then we we get stuck in this like a chihuahua chasing its tail? What's the best? What's the best? What's the best? I think that this answer is the best time to send the email is when you yourself have the least friction and will actually send that email.

I think that's massive, you know, because people do get caught up in the Oh shit. It's quarter past two has gone. I'll have to just leave it for tomorrow. And then they're like, why am I getting asked about making sales and like well, you can send email. Yes, they are but I'm just gonna pass to dude, right? Okay, fine. I think an email that is sent is all it sounds cheesy. Right? But like an email that's been sent it's about an email has not been sent like obviously right? So the best time to send it is the time you will send it so for example, there are some people who will send that email to you sending an email each day, right which is what I do with a tape a hand idea insight or something like that I do with email marketing. That's what we do. So I know some people for example, will will go I'll just send an email when the inspiration hits me during that day. That doesn't work for my mindset. Personally, I'm not very good at I'm very much a habit and routine person. And it's good to like to relate habits so for example, the reason I remember I put deodorant on its it was straight after I brush my teeth kind of thing, right? But all I know that when I put the shampoo on my hair in the morning, that's when I'm thinking about oh, what's the topic of today's email gonna be because you want to create you want to build triggers into the habits you've already got, so that you always remember those things right? So for me, I have to send my email first thing in the morning because I get up. I'm going to put shampoo on my head. So I'm going to call it an idea for an email. Cool. Then I know as soon as I sit down at my on my laptop while my cup of tea is brewing, that's when I'm going to slam our email because that's a bit of dead time I'm standing up I haven't had any input into my mind yet, which from the external world, nothing's influenced me yet. I'm purely just doing it from a place of me and what I want to share, and that means it's gonna get done. It means I don't get to like 1030 and I'm dozing off and I said, but I'll pry my spring open. I'm like, fuck it instead of email a day. I've got to I've got to go and do it. Like, that's not gonna happen. And I'm not also weighed down by the rest of the day thinking almost remember to do that. I must remember to do that. Because that gets in the way before you just get the damn thing done.

Absolutely good friend of mine who's an influencer in the fitness space. Pat Rigsby has sent an email a day I think for the last 17 years never missed a day holiday anything. It's the first thing he does when he gets up and he's done. And then you know I mean we can we can look at people been settled. Same thing. It's just part of the daily routine. It's part of their daily work if you're waiting and throwing up obstacles. I think John author Jon Acuff calls it the noble obstacle that we throw up. Oh, but I don't know what time to send it over. But I'm waiting for that one testimonial to come back over. I'm waiting for that sales page to be done. We're throwing up these noble obstacles that give us reasons to avoid doing the uncomfortable thing. When really what if you looked at it, as these people that are on your list are actually sitting in your living room, their guest in your home, and they're waiting for you to get up and address them for the day or they're waiting for a word from you because they opted in to hear from you. And you get up and you are grumpy and you shuffle to the tea pot or the coffee pot and you wait for inspiration before you addressed anyone in the room? You know, Stephen King who's a very prolific novelist, he said, Yes, I write when I'm motivated. I sit down at 8am every day and I write for four hours until the motivation hits. Like it was a discipline and a practice of writing and taking the action. So I think that we wait for things to be perfect. It's the old adage of you can't wait and leave the house when you know all the green lights are going to be on in town. You have to get out and do some stops and starts and just put it in your day. So your time might be morning. It might be better for you to have it stack at lunch when you have a break. Or maybe if you work a full time job or you're running a retail environment and then you want to do it at the end of the day. You know that's up to you. But that also comes a bit Kennedy of knowing your audience. So first you have to know yourself, you know yourself when you're gonna get it done. And you also have to know your audience,

tree tree. What do you mean when you say when you're thinking about knowing your audience? What are you sort of thinking about there? You

know, I think we have to know in general, the people that we're talking to what are their email habits? Are they only on their phone like contractors and real estate agents and fitness professionals who tend to do everything from their phone? They're rarely sitting down to actually check on their desktop, are they stay at home moms? Are they hobbyists? Are they brick and mortar? What are their habits? Where are they checking their email, look at them. Where are they checking their email? What tends to be the time of day they're checking their email if they're running a brick and mortar, they're probably serving customers during the day. They've got people coming in and out, you know, those kind of things. So know your audience know if they're off on the weekend. If they're off on the weekends. Does that mean they're totally off on the weekend? Or does that mean they're catching up on admin and email on the weekend? I think you won't know everything about them, but you can generalise and you can make some, you know, basic hypothetical guesses.

Yeah, I think I think one of the things to do is again I want to just hop back to I think it's superseding all of this is still when you will do it like if you know your audience. If you're like, oh my audience doesn't really check emails in the morning, but the only time you know you're gonna send an email is in the morning. Do it in the morning because some of them will read it in the afternoon. And it still means it's gonna get sent all the things that sort of reminds me of in terms of like getting into the habit and just doing it irrespective of the audience is years and years and years ago. I when I was just performing purely as a full time entertainer. I had a system set up where someone would book me for a gigs of books because I'm on the phone talk about their event. Taught I call them the event. And I got the call with this one charity, they got on the call with me. Great event coming up it was like it was it was like a veterinarian, sort of charity look after animals and Stuff They Don't Really Care About and they really talked me down on my price. Like they negotiated really well like I wasn't as skilled as they were. They nailed me right. absolutely nailed me. And so I was like, Yeah, cool. I'll do for that price. I said I was pretty happy. They had told me down. I confirmed the event and I put it up put it in my in my system. What I'd sort of forgotten because it had been preset up was in my system when I booked an event that was an automated upsell, right? I mean that's, you know, I was using marketing in like a regular sort of bit with regular business entertainment business. I don't have as regular but but in a non marketing business to have an automated upsell. So what would happen is like two weeks later, they get an email saying hey, I've just been thinking about your event. I was thinking I could do this really cool, special thing where I do I don't know what it was now but I can do something special for it. It's an extra this amount would that be so you're gonna be interesting chatting about. The first thing I remember about even having that upsell is bear in mind just also called Two weeks ago from this client used to talk me down on my price. I get an email reply from an email that I'd forgotten that was all only being sent which just said that sounds great. Yeah, let's do that. And they were they were now agreeing to spend more than my original fee. And but normally think like ordinarily if if I was manually gonna do the upsell been tucked down on my on my feet. When I was offered the upsell, no, I'd be like, Oh, well, you know, I thought it was automated. That give me that sort of confidence. That meant that it was it was happening anyway, I ended up with that. So it's all about making sure you have things in place to have confidence. So for example, I know you will have a toilet the fact that having automations in place, they give you the confidence on that.

They do and I as a business coach, I would say that's when you know you need to create the automations is so that they can be brave when you are not able to so that they can keep working when you are not able to I coach a lot of people that are very different seasons of life meaning grief or busy or crisis. And what we know is that automations sometimes really are a saving grace because we might not be feeling brave enough to finish the launch. We might not be feeling alert or aware or even confident enough in our offer on that particular hard week which we all have those that particular hard week, which means we're making assumptions and projections or are just not functioning the way we should. So I'm a huge proponent of building the automations creating the campaigns which is why you love email blueprint, honestly create the campaign so that they can do the heavy lifting so that you don't have to

write right right. So what we're basically saying is the very best time the very best time to send email is the time you will send it and if you want to get more dialled in than that, then have a look at testing morning, afternoon and evening. And just really cognizant, be really aware of your audience but don't overthink your audience. I think a lot of people get tied up and weighed down and in really overthinking all my audience doesn't really check their emails on weekends Do you know that? Do you actually know that? Give it a shot? If you've got a 0% opening, click through rate. Okay, maybe I'll believe you. Right.

And then once you have enough meaningful data, then you can go back and look for patterns. But imagine this. What if you only sent out postal mail based on when you thought people were going to check their mail right? Like that doesn't even make any sense cuz I don't know if you go to the post in the morning in the afternoon or once a week? I mean, I don't so what if I didn't mail you because I'm waiting for the perfect time so that it will land in your box on the one day that you've got like we just can't guess that or guarantee that there can be patterns but you can't. You can't 100% predict but here's the other thing that I would advise. As someone who coaches, a lot of business owners, I would say, please stop with the all or nothing mentality. Like I missed that time of day today. So I'm not gonna email at all today, or I missed two days of this week. Now I'm embarrassed. They're gonna think I'm flaky if I email them now, I would say think like somebody who's trying to create a pattern of working out and being more physically active. Like if I workout at 6am, maybe that's optimal. Maybe that's optimal. Maybe noon is less than optimal, but I still got it in maybe 9pm is the least optimal time of day but I made the effort I showed up and I'm still going to build muscle from that workout. So and if I miss a day it doesn't mean that tomorrow, I can't move my body. It just means I'm probably gonna have a little more soreness or I'm gonna be a little less familiar. You know, it's gonna take me a couple more days to get back in the habit. We have to really stop with the all or nothing. It really is just a way of letting ourselves off the hook. Honestly. Yeah,

that's a really good point. I think it is. It is. It's basically an excuse to go Oh, I missed it. So a lot of what we talked about today in terms of getting those emails out there, all the automations and stuff you can find inside of our email hero blueprint programme, which Kerry mentioned before I want to go check out the details of that. Check out more than 45 Done For You already written email campaigns for everything you could possibly want to do. Plus all of our training everything you want to do with real marketing go check it out email hero blueprint.com email hero blueprint.com. And now it's time for this week's

subject line of the week.

Right So this week, I sent out an email with the subject line, spitting chicken. I know we talked about this earlier as well and you saw this video too. Obviously, it was literally the two words spinning chicken. And I think it worked really, really well actually our click through rate from that was was really pretty good. The reason I think it worked well was because by accident, this was completely accidental. I accidentally did something which I didn't realise I was doing. What you can't tell from that subject line is whether I'm talking about a chicken that was spitting or the fact that somebody is splitting some chicken. Now it was the latter it was the second one it was talking about the fact that the story was limited about when is a waiter wait until you've got a mouthful of food before they ask you do you have any more drinks and you're like even the equivalent chicken at this point, but I think that's one of the only reasons it works. It has a lot of like quite it's quite what we like to call compound curiosity. It has a lot of questions. It's like is a chicken spitting? Why was a chicken spitting at you? Who was he spending at all? Were you spitting some chicken and someone who was like there are lots of questions on that. But the really important thing, as usual is the subject line had nothing to do with the product. And that's really, really important. It's a pattern that you'll see a lot in really good supervisors. They tend not have anything to do with the product

when I'm super curious, and I've got to go dig into today's emails because I haven't haven't read that yet. So thank you so much for listening to the whole show today. Be sure to hit subscribe on your podcast player and we'll speak to you next week.

Make sure you hit subscribe on your podcast player to automatically download new episodes of The New Email Marketing Show every email Marketing Wednesday.