Guess what Wednesday? You are now the new “IT” day for email newsletter senders.

Posted on | January 3, 2008 |

I have an email mailing list of just over 30K people. Every week before I hit send I’m faced with the conundrum – are my readers in the mood to receive this newsletter now?

One instance of email overload and they hit the unsubscribe button or – horrors – the spam button causing all ISPs to question my authenticity.  

I try to put myself in the readers mind –

It’s Monday 9 AM  – I’m annoyed – I’ve got tons of spam and bacon I’m going on an unsubscribe rampage It’s Wed 9 PM finally the kids are in bed and I can read some emails for myself.   It’s Thursday afternoon I’ve only got one more day sucking up to the boss. I’m going to stick it to the man and fool around on the computer this afternoon. It’s Saturday morning, it’s cold out, I’m procrastinating going to the gym let me see what’s unread in my inbox…. 

Two years ago Emails sent on Friday had the highest average open rate. Well guess what Wednesday? You are now the new “IT” day for email newsletter senders.

According to the most recent eROI benchmark study of email-campaign clickthrough and open rates 

Average e-mail open rates on Wednesdays for Q3 were 25.4

•  Average click rates for Wednesdays were 3.9%, second only to Saturday, which clocked in average click rates of 5% on open rates of a comparatively low 18.7%, according to eROI.
• The second best-performing day was Monday, with average open rates of 24.7% and click rates of 3.1%.

Of course now, like lemmings, we all will start sending on Wednesdays and set off those itchy spam button fingers. Sigh. I think I’m going to try 2:59 PM on Thursdays….don’t tell anyone.I could make a more educated guess about my readers if my email service provider provided better data and segmentation.

Below: My wishlist to email marketing service providers. Are you listening iContact? :

1. Let my readers choose what time and day they want the mail
2. Let them choose the frequency. J. Crew asks when you try to unsubscribe if you’d rather just receive less emails.
3. Give me some data on why they unsubscribed.
4. Give me data on those people that never open my emails so I can get them off my list and up my open rates
5. Give me data on the average time that my emails are read. (Bonus feature - automatically adjust per person’s reading history so that the mail goes to them when they are most likely to read it)
6. Segment send times based on the reader’s time zone.

Related reading:

Wednesday Best Email Day in Q3, Late Afternoon Best Time of Day 

Best Time To Send An Email Determined

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