Email messages scheduled as the work day begins and progresses see a marked decline in click rates, with rates not picking up again until the afternoon, before peaking overnight, finds MailerMailer in a July 2012 report covering more than 1.2 billion opt-in email newsletters sent in 2011. In H2, average click rates began declining at 6 AM and were lowest at 12 PM (1.3%), but increased steadily to 2.4% at 4 PM, reaching a peak of 5.8% at 12 AM. In H1, while the pattern was similar, click rates were highest overnight, hitting a high of 7.4% at 3 AM.
Email open rates also were found to decline during the workday, before picking up in the afternoon and hitting highs of 18-19% at midnight. This contrasts with March 2012 findings from an Informz study of its association clients’ email performance in 2011, which suggested that email open rates were best in the morning, while click rates performed best in the late afternoon. It is worth noting that the email client samples were obviously different, but also that both the open rates and click rates found in the Informz study were significantly higher than in the MailerMailer study (the former with open rate highs of 39.2% and click rate highs of 21%). Read the rest at MarketingCharts.
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