Email marketing: Study shows optimal time to send emails

E-MAIL MARKETING What are the most popular sending times in email marketing? How do my mailings perform compared to the industry? How have the open and click rates developed compared to the previous year? The new email marketing benchmark from Inxmail provides the answers to these questions.Marketers can find concise key figures and exciting insights into mailings in the Inxmail Email Marketing Benchmark 2016. The new edition of the study provides an overview of the best times to send emails, a comprehensive industry comparison and further insights for successful mailings. The email marketing specialist analyzed the open, click and bounce rates of more than 1,000 customers. Trigger mailings with particularly good performance values were also examined this year.Opening and click rates have increasedThe benchmark shows a positive trend in email marketing: compared to the previous year, the average open and click rates have risen slightly, while the bounce rate has fallen slightly. The results indicate that senders are increasingly focusing on relevant content and mailing list maintenance and that this is being rewarded by recipients.

The importance of relevance for successful email marketing is also confirmed by the above-average open and click rates of the evaluated trigger mailings. These mailings are sent automatically for a specific event, such as a birthday. On an annual average, trigger mailings with the B2B target group have almost twice as high open rates (54.5%) as "regular" mailings (28.8%). The click rate is even almost three and a half times as high. In the B2C sector, the values for event-related mailings also clearly stand out from those of "regular" mailings.Friday with the highest opening rateAnother important factor for the success of a mailing is the time at which it is sent: in the B2B sector, Friday is ahead with an average open rate of 30.1%. At 26.9%, Saturday clearly performs the worst. The click rate falls sharply on Saturdays and Sundays compared to the other days of the week. In the B2C sector, on the other hand, the highest values can be found on Saturday with an open rate of 34.3% and a click rate of 7.1%. Mailings that are sent shortly after midnight achieve the highest open rates in the B2B sector, as these are placed quite high up in the recipients' inboxes when they start work in the morning. In the B2C sector, on the other hand, the best open rates can be found late in the evening. For both target groups, mornings tend to be an unfavorable time to send.Art and culture at the forefrontThe industry comparison shows that both the open and click rates are highest in the arts and culture sector, followed by leisure and tourism in second place. If, on the other hand, we look at the effective click rate, which reflects the ratio of recipients who open to those who click, the chemicals and pharmaceuticals sector is the most successful.

The Complete Inxmail Email Marketing Benchmark 2016 can be downloaded free of charge. For the study, Inxmail analyzed tens of thousands of newsletters with a total mailing volume of several billion emails from 2013 to 2015. Trigger and transactional emails were analyzed separately.