Posted by: Mackenzie Ross, Marketing Coordinator

There is no clear best practice, or set-in-stone rule, as to when to send an email broadcast. That’s because it all depends on your specific audience. Every audience’s email-checking habits are different. For example, a B2B audience might check mail throughout the day while stay-at-home moms might only check email at night. There are, however, different steps you can take to zero in on your audience’s preferred send time.

Get Started: Check your site analytics and note the busiest times. You can use this information to tell when your customers are their most active or are more engaged at their computers. This may be easier to nail down for a business audience, given that you know the work day’s approximate start time, lunch hour and end time.

Dig Deeper: Take a look at the basics of your send list. Are they in different time zones? If so, you should be thinking about each time zone separately. You probably don’t want to be sending overseas and locally at the same time. What are their demographics? Are there more males or females, and what is the age range you are targeting? Chances are you have a pretty good idea of this basic info about your general audience and should be able to infer some of their preferences.

Test: Whether you know a lot or a little about your audience, you should be testing different times with them. Compare opens (or click-throughs) on different days of the week and different times of day. Just because you’ve always sent your emails at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday doesn’t mean that’s your audience’s preference. A quick way to learn a bit more about your audience’s behavior is to look at the data you already have from past sends and see when most people opened or clicked hour by hour.

The great thing about email is you can track what your users are doing and learn how to better meet their needs.