When to Send Your Sales and Marketing Emails by InsideView

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Email messages often get lost. Sometimes emails are mistakenly labeled as spam or deleted accidentally, and they never get to your prospects. Every marketer and sales person falls victim to lost emails, and while some causes are unavoidable, there's one that you can almost always prevent: unread messages that sit until they are deleted during routine cleanup.  According to Entrepreneur.com, the longer an email message sits unread, the more likely it is that the recipient will never read it. Even if an email program doesn't routinely delete unread messages, your recipients may do so after a long period of time. And if your prospect ever does get to your email a few weeks after you sent it, is it even still relevant?
B2B salespeople can't afford this problem. Unread emails are missed sales opportunities. In addition, each missed message represents time and effort you could have used more productively elsewhere. If you want your email campaigns to be successful, you need to time them so they will be read.
People don't read emails at random times; there's a pattern to open rates. Early in the morning often has great success, while emails sent between 5 and 8 pm often don't get read. This is because of people's routines and habits. People like to check email first thing in the morning; they may be commuting, making supper or relaxing in the evening. B2B salespeople can take advantage of their customer base's habits to increase the probability that their emails will be read. In most cases, the best times to send emails are between 8 am and 9 am or 3 pm and 4 pm. Depending on your customer base, you may also have success sending messages at lunch time.
These ideas are generalizations, however; you'll need to learn your customers' actual habits to determine which times work best for you. Take surveys and talk to customers to find out when they are likely to read emails. You may also want to use your open stats and other metrics to help you determine the best times to send customer emails.
Make sure you keep time zones in mind when planning your email strategy. People on the West Coast may be first getting up and checking emails at your lunchtime and people who are in other countries may be going to bed. You may need to stagger email delivery times to ensure that everyone gets the email at the optimal time.
In any case, if you pay more attention to your customers' email habits, you can determine the best time to send emails. This will greatly enhance your email response rates.