The most common answer to “when should I send marketing emails” is “Tuesday or Thursday morning, around 10am.” You’ll find this in virtually every email marketing guide, and it’s based on aggregated data from millions of campaigns. It’s also, for your specific list and your specific audience, probably wrong.
Why the Standard Advice Exists
Email marketing platforms — Mailchimp, Klaviyo, HubSpot — have access to enormous datasets. Across all their customers, all their industries, all their lists, mid-week mornings do tend to perform slightly better than Monday mornings or Friday afternoons. The aggregate numbers are real.
But averages hide enormous variation. B2B emails to finance directors perform differently to B2C emails to gym members. Emails about restaurant offers perform differently to emails about software renewals. What’s true on average across every industry, every audience, and every type of email tells you very little about what’s true for your list.
What Actually Drives Email Performance
Before optimising send time, make sure you’ve got the bigger variables right:
- Subject line — the single biggest driver of open rate. A compelling subject line at 9pm Friday will outperform a dull one at 10am Tuesday. Every time.
- Sender name — people open emails from people they recognise and trust. A personal name usually outperforms a company name.
- List quality — an engaged list of people who opted in and want to hear from you will open at any time. A purchased or stale list will ignore your emails regardless of when you send them.
- Frequency — how often you’re emailing matters more than when. Too frequently and you get unsubscribes. Too infrequently and people forget who you are.
If those aren’t already working well, timing optimisation is a distraction.
How to Find Your Actual Best Time
The only reliable way to find the best send time for your list is to test it directly.
A/B test your send times. Most email platforms let you split a campaign — send 50% at 9am and 50% at 7pm, or split Monday vs Thursday. Run the test several times across different campaigns. Look at open rates, click rates, and conversions. Over time, patterns emerge that are specific to your audience, not someone else’s aggregate.
Also look at your existing data. If you have historical campaigns, look at when your opens are actually happening. Most email platforms show you an hourly open breakdown. If 60% of your opens happen within the first two hours of sending, and those opens cluster at certain times of day, that’s your list telling you when it’s active.
Patterns Worth Knowing
Without testing, here are some patterns that tend to hold up:
- B2B audiences — Tuesday to Thursday, mid-morning (8–10am) or just after lunch (1–2pm). Avoid Monday mornings (inboxes are being triaged) and Friday afternoons.
- B2C audiences — more varied, but evenings and weekends can work well, especially for impulse-type purchases. People browse differently on their phone at 8pm than at their desk at 10am.
- Retail / e-commerce — Thursday or Friday sends can drive weekend purchases. Abandoned cart emails should go quickly — within an hour or two of the cart being abandoned.
These are starting points, not conclusions.
Time Zones
If your list spans multiple time zones, sending at “10am” means something very different depending on who you’re sending to. Most email platforms let you send based on the recipient’s local time zone — use this if you have an international list. Sending a “limited time offer” at 3am isn’t a good look.
Consistency Matters More Than Optimisation
Here’s an underappreciated point: your audience learns when to expect your emails. If you send every Tuesday morning at 9am, your subscribers start to anticipate it. Some will open it immediately because they’re used to seeing it then. Chopping and changing your send time — always chasing a marginally better slot — disrupts that pattern.
Find a time that works reasonably well and stick to it. Fine-tune over time, but don’t obsess. A consistent email sent at 8am Thursday will usually outperform a perfectly optimised email sent at random times.
The Bottom Line
There is no universally correct time to send marketing emails. Tuesday morning is a reasonable starting point if you’re guessing, but the right answer for your list comes from testing, not borrowing someone else’s benchmarks. Focus first on subject lines, list quality, and frequency — those variables matter more than timing. Once those are working, run proper A/B tests and make decisions based on what your audience actually does.
