What is the best time to send marketing emails?

For opens, the best time to send marketing emails is usually the morning, roughly 9 AM to 11 AM. Omnisend's 2026 study of about 26 billion emails found it the most reliable window for opens. Other studies find different peaks, especially for clicks, so treat the morning as your starting point and test other slots for your sales emails.

The best time of day to send marketing emails

Opens and clicks peak at different hours. In Omnisend's study, clicks peaked from 7 AM to 8 AM and again around 4 PM, and evening sends came nowhere near those click windows. The 9 AM to 11 AM window for opens holds for the week as a whole, even though the single best hour for opens changes from day to day, as the table further down shows. GetResponse notes that Apple's Mail Privacy Protection feature distorts open data, as it can register opens that no reader made. Clicks are the surer sign that someone acted on your email.

GetResponse's data gives different slots. It looked at more than 4.4 billion messages its customers sent in 2023. Two slots stood out as worth trying for opens and clicks: early morning, from 4 AM to 6 AM, and late afternoon, from 5 PM to 7 PM. The two studies differ in size and date, so it's no surprise they don't agree on one hour. Treat their peaks as slots to test and let your own clicks decide. You can schedule an early send in advance, so nobody has to be up at 4 AM.

The hour matters because most reactions come quickly. In GetResponse's data, about 70% of opens and 85% of clicks came within the first 24 hours. The first hour alone brought 21.20% of opens and 44.14% of clicks.

The best day to send a marketing email

For opens and clicks, the best day to send marketing emails is usually midweek. In Omnisend's data, Tuesday leads for opens and clicks, and Friday leads for sales. Sinch Mailgun's data also gives Tuesday to Thursday the highest open rates. The differences between days are small, though, and in Omnisend's study the best and worst day for opens are only about 1.6 percentage points apart.

So if you already send on a fixed day, keep it and pick the hour that matches your goal. The table gives the best hour for each goal on each day of Omnisend's study.

Best hour to send on each day of the week (Omnisend)

Is Friday a good day to send marketing emails?

Yes, especially for sales emails. In Omnisend's study, Friday at 7 AM had the highest conversion rate of any hour, which makes it the best time to send email on Friday for sales. The Friday peak for opens came at 9 AM. If your Friday campaigns already sell well, there's no reason to move them.

Which send time suits a newsletter or a sales email?

The best time to send a newsletter is a Tuesday or Wednesday morning, and a sales email does best at the hours when people click and buy. That's because a newsletter mainly needs to be opened and read, while a sales email needs people to act. In Omnisend's data, clicks and sales peak at different hours from the opens.

Our advice: decide what each email should achieve before you pick its time. For newsletters, Omnisend names Tuesday and Wednesday between 9 AM and 11 AM as the strongest windows. Tuesday's single best hour for opens came earlier, at 7 AM, so an earlier Tuesday send is worth a test too. For a sale or a product launch, test an early morning send against a late afternoon one and compare the clicks and sales. Then you know which window actually earns you money, and you can plan your next email marketing campaign around it.

The best time to send B2B marketing emails

The best time to send B2B emails may be during the working day in the middle of the week. Omnisend notes that business subscribers may respond in working hours. Consumers may behave very differently, so it's worth timing your B2B and B2C emails separately. The best time to send cold emails, in Omnisend's view, is usually Tuesday to Thursday from 8 AM to 10 AM, after the Monday rush.

Before you send, check who you're allowed to email. Under the UK rules, you can send marketing emails to companies, but individuals need to have given their specific consent. The exception is someone who has already bought a similar product or service from you, or started negotiating to buy one. That only applies if you gave them a simple way to opt out when you collected their details and in every message since. Sole traders and some partnerships count as individuals. The ICO's guidance on electronic mail marketing sets out the details, and the ICO notes it is under review after the Data (Use and Access) Act.

How to test send times on your own list

Your own list has the final say, and a simple split test shows you its best time. Split your list at random into two groups of about the same size. Send the same email to each group at a different time, for example 9 AM and 4 PM, and keep everything else the same. If your newsletter tool offers a split or A/B test, it can make the random split for you. By the next day most clicks are in, as the GetResponse figures above show, so that's when you can compare the two groups. Omnisend suggests repeating that test over 3 to 5 campaigns before you decide, so one good day doesn't mislead you.

Judge each test by its clicks, not its opens. With Mail Privacy Protection switched on, Apple Mail downloads an email's remote content in the background, whether or not the reader engages with it. That download is counted as an open, so an email can look opened when nobody has read it. If some of your subscribers live abroad, segment them by location, since Omnisend notes that the best send time can shift with time zone.

Good timing won't rescue a weak email, so it's worth learning how to write marketing emails people want to read. The sender matters as well. GetResponse recommends sending your campaigns from an address on your own domain, properly authenticated, as a way to invest in your brand.

Send emails from your own domain and make every message recognisable as yours.

Schedule your next campaign

Once your tests show which window suits each goal, set your campaigns to go out at that time. You can schedule your newsletters with Ubivox, an add-on you can get with us. You choose when each email goes out, and its statistics show what time of day your subscribers read it, so you can see whether your window keeps working.