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After realizing it can significantly boost your company's sales, you have decided to embark on a rigorous email marketing campaign.
Everything is set out perfectly- Great subject line, A catchy email body, Unique personalized content, and a compelling CTA. You have also gone the extra mile of mining for the most appropriate target customer base to ensure you don’t shoot blanks.
Your company is strict on finances, but they have set out a small budget to help you shoulder the costs of an email automation tool.
It's on the weekend; this project means everything to you. So you are doing extra hours at work, and you decide it's time to launch the marketing campaign. All is set; you press the send button.
But things go haywire a week later you realize that despite sending thousands of emails, only a few people were interested enough to open your great content. You are now wondering what could have gone wrong.
You messed up the Timing big time! Any day is not a great day to send cold emails, let alone any other email. Specific send times matter, and you’re probably wondering what that could be. Calm your nerves and allow us to educate you on what could have been a miss with your timing.
Join us below as we guide you to increase your email campaign success by discovering the optimal timing for reaching out to cold prospects.
It's an email you send to a person who formerly didn’t know you primarily to introduce them to a business opportunity you’re offering.
Cold emails sales are excellent in giving your business an extensive reach to markets you’d never achieve with conventional marketing techniques.
So are they effective in guaranteeing sales conversions? Well, the best answer is that they can significantly give you a head start over your competitors.
But nothing comes through easily, so you need to get several things right.
Is that all? Well, to the average marketer, with the above hacks, they are done and ready to reach out to prospects. But to stand out, you must all get a little bit more petty.
Really? Well, we’re kidding, but you must find the best time to send cold emails.
It sounds like we’re asking to do way too much than necessary. But you can bank on us that this really matters, and we’ll explain to you in detail why we think so.
Is it bad to send an email late at night? Or is there the best time to send cold emails?
There’s time for everything, which also applies to cold email marketing. Why? Let’s reason together.
Think of this stat. We had a whopping 333.2 billion emails sent in 2022, and the number is projected to keep rising in the coming years. This means that your cold email sales prospect has to deal with a busy inbox every day.
So you’re competing with so many people for the customers' attention, and with the wrong timing, it’s all done and dusted for you.
Hear this again; the largest volume of emails opened after sending is after the first hour. As time wanes, so do the open rates, so if you miss the beat on this parameter, you could have thousands of your emails never opened.
So does timing in b2b cold emailing matter? Absolutely yes. It matters more primarily because you’re an unknown sending reaching out to an individual who’s never heard of you. Email them when they are in the right mood, and they’ll respond.
Spoil their party over the weekend by trying to sell them, and that’s the last time they’ll take you seriously.
Well, it seems like we’re getting more trivial in this discussion. Does it mean some days are better for b2b cold emailing than others? Rather are we missing the point by picking specific days in our cold outreach campaign?
Not at all. We recommend that you primarily focus on the weekdays for obvious reasons. If you send cold emails over the weekend, you’re a nuisance at best to most of the prospects. And if it becomes too much, they may even decide you don’t deserve to appear in their inbox.
You definitely don't want to get blocked, so what are the best days to send cold emails?
Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
Let us explain this in detail below
Imagine you’re seated with your wife and kids on a lazy Sunday afternoon, then an email from an unknown sender pops up.
First, there’s a big chance that you won’t even see it because you have your phone on airplane mode as you simply want to unwind and ready yourself for the incoming week.
And if you check it out, you’ll probably shrug it off because it's a nag at best.
Suppose you remember to open it on Monday, well, good and sound for the salesperson. But this is one of the emails you will probably never respond to. This is exactly the thought process of your prospects when they receive cold emails over the weekend.
So which is the best time to send an email on Sunday? Avoid it if you can. But if this is the only available time, consider scheduling it to send on the next day. The same also applies to public holidays.
Let’s do a simple elimination practice. Pick on Monday.
Do you think it is among the best time to send cold emails? Well, mmm, not bad, but still not good enough. Why? Monday Blues.
Your prospect is just from a great weekend, and the thought of them going back to their routine jobs is simply depressing. And to add insult to injury, they had things they left incomplete when they took a break from work on Friday.
There’s simply too much to fix on Mondays; the last thing anyone wants is more hectic.
It is the day employees return to regular scheduling, and bombarding them with unsolicited cold outreach emails is simply a bad idea. It is better than Sunday, but not merely the best.
We all love Fridays, and your busy prospect fancies them probably more than you do. How about sending them cold sales emails on a day when their spirits are at a weekly high? It is, after all, the eve of fun days.
Don’t miss this point. Fridays have their bad luck, too, for cold email marketing sales. They are not among the best cold open days because prospects are often hurrying to put their workplaces in order as they look to usher on the weekend.
We are left with Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. While there’s no magical charm to these specific days, you can bet on us that they are actually good enough. Prospects are in a working mood and don’t mind taking a few minutes to check out what this anonymous sender is saying.
And don’t get us wrong. Mondays and Fridays are also great, just not quite optimal. But if you invest in sending in significant volumes, Mondays can be as good as Thursdays.
Talking of Thursday, there’s consensus in cold outreach campaigns that this is the best cold open day. Well, we don’t want to emphatically settle on a particular day of the three we’ve given as there is no basal reason to go for Thursday.
Simply do your emails on any weekday but ensure you have the other things right.
Days aside, what is the ideal time to send cold emails?
First, let us get this clear. There’s no absolute best time for cold emails sales. But despite that, there are definitely odd hours that will yield no conversions and other times when your prospects are alert to email notifications.
Fundamentally, know who you’re dealing with. Some clients are most active during the day, so there’s a significant chance they’ll read your mail if you do it now. But you cannot rule out night owls who are super-focussed at night.
Hence, the rule of thumb is to know your client primarily. Next, consider the following time settings.
People are freshest in the morning, and thus this time presents good timing to send cold emails. We often start our days by checking out if we received anything new over the night, making the morning an excellent time to pitch your sale.
So is it bad to send an email late at night? Not at all; you have the prospect by their collar, as this is probably the first thing that’ll catch their attention when they wake up.
How long should a cold email be? Make sure your emails are concise as few are ready to skim through prose at this time. If it looks exciting, you could also get a few conversions. And what a great way to start the day!
Afternoons are not too bad, but they present a tricky challenge—the lunch break.
Afternoons present a moment of reprieve for most people in formal jobs, and some actually use this period to refresh for the later part of the day. So don’t just spoil their good time by sending them an email. But anything after two pm is just fine.
They’ll probably check it out as they’re closing the or at the train waiting bay after work.
We earlier ruled out b2b cold emailing on Sundays, but we have an exception here. Sunday evenings.
It is now dawning on the client that the weekend is over, and it's time they start acclimatizing to the starting new week. So one of the things they’ll probably do is check out their emails to see what has come over the weekend in readiness for acting on it the next day.
This is not the most successful time to send cold emails, but it doesn't hurt either to give it a try. Also, consider trying sending them on other evenings to determine if there’s an excellent open rate.
If it’s good enough, then go for it.
If you’re still yet out of the woods on the best time to send cold emails at this point, we honestly understand you. Simply because there’s no outright time we can consider as the best since this is all pegged on other different factors that are far more important than the time of the day.
Here’s the general rule: Just check out what works best for you.
The factors below will come through in helping you understand the perfect timing hacks to send cold emails.
A common mistake for many email marketing salespersons is assuming that all clients are the same, so they create a generalized message.
This compels them also to assume that their prospects are in the same time zones as directed by YouTube videos by marketing ‘gurus’ that say something like:
“Market on time X”
So without further consideration, they simply prepare their cold emails and send them en masse to these prospects.
But this is where they go wrong. People are different in so many aspects that if all marketers in one company made this mistake, it’d virtually be impossible to make any conversions. Why?
Your client base has unique characteristics such as the following:
So part of the job is comprehensively researching who you’re dealing with. If, say, one prospect is in the EST time zone, another is in CST. And therefore, when seeking the best time to do emails, you must consider this.
Otherwise, your timing will be in vain because you could be sending emails to clients at times when they’re probably asleep.
This is not the time to bank on your gut feeling because the reality is that it actually misguides you more often than not (especially in marketing). Deal with empirical data, and you will have hacked one of the most elusive things for most marketers.
So before embarking on a cold email marketing outreach, send test emails to dozens of respondents and see when they’re most likely to respond. Compile data for different client bases and work based on what it tells you.
If you have a couple of hypotheses, test them first before reaching out to customers. And by that, we mean that you shouldn’t hesitate to test what we’ve just told you in the previous sections- About Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays being the best times to do emails.
Test it yourself.
As the old adage goes, you can never discover the wheel, and here we mean that there’s probably someone else who has successfully run a cold email campaign before you. What did they say is the best time to send cold emails?
And what are the results they achieved after sending them during this period? These should be the kind of parameters to guide you in determining whether you have missed the beat somewhere in your campaign.
Getting a reply from a cold email campaign is fulfilling because it attests that your prospect probably took some time to read what you just said. That said, we often wait for replies at the wrong times and end up disappointed that they are not coming.
Is it asking for too much from the prospect? Well, first, if you send the email at the right time, you can be sure a reply will come your way at some point. So it depends on many factors, but what is the best period to expect a response?
Many people respond during work-off-peak hours- They have more time to read through your message, understand it, and take action. So expect replies around 6 am to 7 am in the mornings.
But if it doesn't come through, then you still have after-work times to wait on, around 5 pm or 8 pm. Others are comfortable replying at noon when they are breaking for lunch, so it all depends on who you’re dealing with.
How is your cold email campaign faring? If all is well, then we’ve just awakened you to more ways of getting the sales up the ceiling.
And if you’ve struggled to make conversions like most marketers, we have just unearthed one of the things that probably pulled you back.
Poor timing.
But with this guide, we know you’re now well-informed to make a great decision to get your cold email campaign right and make massive conversions.
You matter a lot to us, so when you succeed, we know we’re doing the right thing. Follow our advice, and your campaign will, without a doubt, improve.