It’s inevitable that within every sales team people start coming up with hypotheses around the best time to send a cold outreach email in order to maximize the probability of a response. Salespeople will reference their anecdotal evidence to justify why they, for example, avoid Fridays or choose to send at 8am.
For people who often spend significant time crafting high performing emails, it makes perfect sense that they’d want to put those emails in the best conditions to succeed. Fortunately there have been a number of statistically significant studies analyzing the performance of B2B emails (see below).
Have these studies found the mythical day and time to maximize open/response rate? The results confirm that as long as you’re sending emails during the typical M-F work week and within the typical 8am-5pm work day, there is no meaningful difference. There appears to be a very modest increase in open rate for emails sent in the morning before noon compared to those sent in the later part of the day, however it’s unclear if such a strategy will move the needle or not.
Depending on how you look at this you might be surprised or relieved, but the good news is that as long as you’re writing well crafted, personalized emails that are full of value, you can send them at any time within the work day/week. If you want a very slight improvement, make sure to send your emails earlier in the recipient’s day, but the biggest impact will be the email itself.
