The early email catches the reader

E-MAIL MARKETING A study by Inxmail reveals the best times to send emails in email marketing. There are a few surprises.At what time of day are the most mailings sent? When are the opening and click rates highest? What are the key figures for the individual sectors? The Inxmail Email Marketing Benchmark 2015 provides the answers to these questions. As part of the study, the email marketing expert examined the open rates, click rates and response rates of more than 1,000 companies, and the results show that the best mailing day in the B2B sector is Sunday, with an average open rate of 29.3%. In the B2C sector, on the other hand, Saturday is ahead with 32.3%. The winner in the sector comparison is the "Art and culture" sector. The average open rate for mailings from companies in this segment is the highest at 53.6%. In contrast, the "Chemicals and pharmaceuticals" sector has the highest click rate.

The most popular times for sending mailings are around 11 a.m. in the morning and between 2 and 5 p.m. in the afternoon. However, mailings that are sent at completely different times achieve the highest open rates: In the B2B segment, this is the period shortly after midnight - i.e. at a very early hour. In the B2C segment, on the other hand, mailings sent in the evening between 9 p.m. and midnight are opened most frequently, while mailings sent between 6 a.m. and 12 noon have the lowest open rate. Surprisingly, the weekend is an exception in the B2B sector: at just under 47%, the open rate for mailings sent on Sundays between 9 am and 12 noon is extremely high. On Saturdays, it is still 38.5% in this period. However, the click rate in the B2B sector is very low on Saturdays: it averages just 1.3% here, while it does not slip below 3.5% on any of the other days of the week.A significant difference between B2B and B2C mailers also becomes clear when you look at the open rate over the course of the year: While the figures are highest in the B2B segment at Christmas, they are lowest in the B2C segment at precisely this time.Overall, open rates have once again fallen slightly in both the B2B and B2C segments. One reason for this is the increasing competition in recipients' inboxes. Relevant content tailored precisely to the recipient is therefore becoming increasingly important. Downloaded free of charge are analyzed. Several tens of thousands of newsletters with a total mailing volume of several billion emails were analyzed for the study. Trigger and transactional emails were not included in the data collection.