Timing is, in fact, everything, and that’s especially true of newsletters. Send it too early and it’s likely to get mindlessly deleted along with a pile of other emails. Send it too late and they won’t devote their full attention to it because they just want to get out of the office and they’ve already mentally checked out for the day.
Obviously, you can’t stalk every one of your newsletter subscribers to see what they’re doing and when they’re most receptive to opening your newsletter, but there are some things you can consider.
Table of Contents
- The Best Time to Send a Newsletter According to Most People
- Track Your Own Newsletter Data
- How Frequently Should You Send Your Newsletter?
- You Have Their Attention, Now Make the Most of It
- Subscribe to Your Own Newsletter
The Best Time to Send a Newsletter According to Most People
Midday, Midweek
The advice to neither send it too early nor too late applies to both the time of the day and the time of the week. Monday mornings are a terrible time to send newsletters because people’s inboxes are full from emails people have collected over the weekend and they tend to go through and delete most of them without a second glance.
Weekends are well-known to be the worst time to send newsletters. People are less likely to open them until Monday morning, at which point your newsletter will probably be unceremoniously deleted along with all the other emails that have piled up over the weekend.
Events
Despite the importance of timing, it’s also necessary to keep in mind that only about 23% of emails get opened within the first hour after they’ve been sent. Most of the rest get deleted, but there are some people who do hang onto the newsletters they receive and open them a day or two later. For that reason, it’s important to send newsletters about events approximately 3-5 days before the event itself. Give your newsletter subscribers plenty of time to open your email and make plans before the big day.
Tuesday and Thursday
MailChimp’s data has found that Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best days to reach people, although Wednesdays are also good days to send newsletters.
Daytime
Obviously, you’re better off sending emails during the day, when people are awake and at their desk, as opposed to nighttime, when most people are asleep.
The favored times to send newsletters tend to be 9am-11am and 1pm-3pm. The key is to avoid the lunch hours and get their attention before it gets too close to closing time when all they can think about is how much they want to get out of there.
Track Your Own Newsletter Data
While these general recommendations can be a great starting point for your own newsletter, your audience might have its own schedule and habits that make the recommended times less applicable. That’s why it’s important to always track the open rates and click-through rates of all your newsletters to see what gets the best results with your audience.
When Are They Opening Your Newsletter?
The first thing you need to do is track when people are opening your newsletter. If only a few subscribers are opening your newsletter, and they’re opening them two or three hours after you send it, maybe it’s time to adjust your newsletter’s schedule.
If you aren’t getting the open rates you’d like later in the day, you might want to try an earlier time, and/or a different day.
For example, if you’re in a B2B industry and you know your newsletter is being sent to their work email addresses, then weekdays would be ideal days to send your newsletter because your recipients are more likely to be in the office and checking their work email.
If, on the other hand, you’re in a B2C industry and your newsletters are going to your subscribers’ personal email addresses, then they might be more likely to check them in the evenings and over the weekend. This is why many retailers tend to send their newsletters over the weekend and on weekday evenings. Those are times when people tend to be shopping, so it makes sense to push that kind of content in front of them at those times.
When I started sending my newsletter, I sent it out every Tuesday at 7:30am because I was trying to emulate another content marketer I admire. When I checked my data, I noticed most of the emails getting opened were getting opened closer to 8:30am on Wednesday, so that’s when I started sending my newsletter, and my open rates increased.
What’s Your Newsletter’s Click-Through Rate (CTR)?
Once you’ve gotten them to open your email, how many of them are clicking on the links you provide to your site? If you have a high open rate, but a low CTR, then you still have some work to do. It could be a matter of your content failing to motivate your subscribers to click through, it could be timing, or it could be a different matter altogether, which is why testing and retesting is so important.
Email management systems, like MailChimp, make it very easy to get the most of your newsletters by letting you run A/B tests in which you send two slightly different campaigns simultaneously and see which one gets the best results. You can do this as many times as you need to find the perfect time that works for your audience.
Email management systems also let you schedule newsletters to be sent at different times to different subscribers. For example, if you have subscribers on the East Coast and subscribers in the Midwest and you want to make sure they all receive your newsletter at 10:00 am local time, you can do that just by clicking a few buttons.
How Frequently Should You Send Your Newsletter?
Another factor of newsletters that’s very important to remember is the frequency. You want to send your subscribers newsletters often enough to stay top-of-mind for your industry with them, but not so often that you annoy them and prompt them to either ignore your emails and/or unsubscribe.
I recommend once a week or every other week. You can get away with once a month, but that’s the least you can get away with before people start forgetting who you are.
I hear a lot of people in the professional services space saying they want to send a quarterly newsletter, but that’s just a waste of time and energy.
Think about how much you forget about in the course of three months. It’s a lot.
If you find your way to a website, see some interesting content, subscribe to their newsletter, then don’t hear from them for 3 months, what are the chances you’re going to remember who they are or why they’re emailing you?
I understand not wanting to inundate people with endless emails, but don’t overcompensate by letting them forget about you.
You Have Their Attention, Now Make the Most of It
Open rates and CTRs aren’t always about timing (although that’s always a good place to start if you aren’t seeing the results you want). Sometimes they’re about headlines.
Aside from timing, the factor most likely to determine whether subscribers open your email is going to be your headline. Is it compelling or bland? Is it something that speaks to their pain points, or is it completely unrelated to their lives?
Your headline can be funny, intriguing, conversational, controversial, etc. The one thing it cannot be is boring and/or unrelatable.
A good place to start with your headlines is CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer. It can tell you if your headline is too short, too long, and the percentage of the headline that contains power words, emotional words, etc. It will even show you what your headline looks like in an email inbox.
My other favorite tool is the Advanced Marketing Institute’s headline analyzer, which analyzes how emotional your headline is and the primary emotion your headline is eliciting. I us this tool all the time because, if your headline doesn’t make people feel something, they’re not going to bother clicking through to read/watch/listen to the rest of your content
So, now that they’re opening your newsletter, what could you possibly put inside it to keep them interested?
New Blog Posts
I always recommend sending a newsletter as soon as you publish a new blog post. The same goes for videos, podcast episodes, etc. If you’re creating all kinds of different content on a variety of platforms, let your newsletter subscribers know about all the platforms you’re on and all the content you’re creating so they can engage with the content on their preferred platform.
Events/Sales
If you’re hosting an event (or you’re going to be a speaker at an event), mention that in your newsletter a few days before the event itself so your subscribers have a chance to make arrangements to attend, if possible.
The same goes for any sale you might be running. A big reason people subscribe to newsletters is so they can be the first to know if there’s a sale happening or if you’re releasing anything new, which leads me to mynext piece of advice:
Business News
Are you launching a new product or service?
Are you publishing a book?
Are you merging with another company that provides similar services?
Anything that’s newsworthy should go in your newsletter.
Exclusive Content
People love being in the know and privy to all sorts of things no one else knows about yet. Whether this means announcing things via your newsletter before you tell anyone else, or providing your subscribers with content no one else gets (such as exclusive tips and tricks), those are all reasons for people to sign up for your newsletter, thereby inviting you into the last bit of private space on the internet they have: their inboxes.
Roundup
Some companies do roundup-style newsletters, in which they provide links to their latest blog post, but they also provide links to other interesting and related information they’ve seen elsewhere online. This is a great way to position yourself as an authority in your industry by demonstrating that you know where to get the best information.
It’s also a great way to build relationships with influencers in your industry. Everyone appreciates knowing that someone valued their content enough to share it with their audience, so send them a quick note to let them know what you did, or even send them a copy of the newsletter.
Subscribe to Your Own Newsletter
Finally, it’s important to subscribe to your own newsletter if you don’t already. That way, you can see how it looks, both on your browser and on your mobile devices (remember, more people are checking their email on their phone, so being mobile friendly is key).
You should also check all your links to make sure they work properly. If any of them don’t work or a wrong link somehow found it’s way in there, send a follow-up email immediately addressing the mistake and providing the proper link. You can’t do any of that if you don’t subscribe to your own newsletter, so it’s important to subscribe, open, and click.
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