New Data on the Best Time to Send Sales Emails

Mike Baker

Our Marketing VP, Joe Chernov, had a brief spell of Twitter fame in the fall of 2013 when he posted this tweet in response to a sales rep asking him what the best time to call him was:

The best time to call me is email.

— Joe Chernov (@jchernov) October 15, 2013

The tweet is funny, but it also resonated with so many people because it’s true: We rarely pick up the phone anymore, and email has become the preferred method for having an ongoing conversation. Especially in business. Modern business conversations have migrated from the phone to email, which is the major reason the traditional “cold sales call” has largely become the “cold sales email.”

But this doesn’t mean the problems that plague cold calling don’t affect emails. Just because emails can be opened and responded to at any time doesn’t mean they’re immune to being ignored. It’s been proven again and again that the majority of sales emails don’t get opened.

What causes some sales emails to get opened while others languish in the inbox (or, worse, the spam trap)? Part of it has to do with the right subject line, but a large part of getting your emails opened is sending them at the right time.

There’s only one problem: There is no consensus about the best time to send sales emails.

We know how important getting sales emails opened is, so we decided to conduct the study for ourselves. We studied every single sales and marketing email we sent for a week and compared the time they were sent to their open rates.

The results completely changed how we send our emails. We kept the findings to ourselves for a while, but we decided the information was too good to not share. So now, for the first time, you can download the findings of our Sales Email Open Rates Study.

If you’re in a rush, here’s the tl;dr version:

• Send in the morning. Emails sent before noon are almost twice as likely to get opened compared to those sent in the afternoon, and more than four times as those sent at night,

• Send in the middle of the week. Emails sent on the weekend still get read, but the days with the highest open rate are Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.

• Plan your sales reps’ schedules around high open times. Once you identify the best times to email (either using our data or by studying your own sales emails), structure your reps’ days so that they are sending emails in these windows and doing research or going to meetings at times with low open rates.

The full report has all of the numbers from our study so you can come to your own conclusions about the best time for your team to send sales emails.

And for even more information (including actionable tips for the 4 main types of sales emails), check out our full Guide to Writing Effective Sales Emails.

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