Home > Email Marketing Articles > Insights on The Worst-day-to-send

[ Insights on The Worst-day-to-send ] By Mark Brownlow

Here's a little experiment I did on the worst-day-to-send your email.

My email marketing newsletter goes out every two weeks on a Monday. Has done since I started. The last one was slated for Monday, January 1st.

I can't actually imagine a worse day to send a B2B email on. First, nobody is in the office. Pretty much anywhere: it's like a near-global public holiday.

Second, when people do return to the office, they have to catch up with thousands of other things. No time to immerse themselves in new advice and information.

So I sent it anyway, simply to see just how bad things would work out metrics-wise. (This is the advantage of being a one-man independent operation. You can make stupid business decisions and not have to worry about criticism from above.)

My prediction: open rates about 50% of the usual, plus a slight decrease in CTR.

The actual results?

Well, first of all a whole slew of "Out of Office Replies" came in, which was quite interesting as you can learn a lot about people from those.

Second, very low open rates in the initial 24 hours. But...10 days later and here are the "final" results...

Average open rate of the newsletter over the last three months: 40.7%
Open rate of the Jan 1st issue: 38.0%

That's a fall of just 2.7 percentage points or 6.6%. Not ideal, but hardly the expected disaster. In fact, totally within the normal range.

Average CTR over the last three months: 39.5%
CTR of the Jan 1st issue: 38.9%

i.e. no significant difference.

So what's going on there? Any ideas?

If you are looking to get started right away, check out our recommended email marketing solutions - FXstyle eMail Marketing. FXstyle as an innovative company provide everything you need to start your email marketing campaign quickly and easily.