Email marketing is one of the most proven, efficient and cost-effective methods for generating and nurturing B2B leads. Anyone who is familiar with the practice knows, however, that it’s a little more nuanced than writing your campaign and hitting “send” as soon as it’s ready. So, when is the best time to send cold email to get opens, interactions and conversions? Read on.

How many times have you woken up to a reasonably full email inbox that you had no interest in parsing through, so you simply filed the emails away or deleted them? Your contacts behave the exact same way.

You work hard to ensure your cold contacts are engaged with your email, so the last thing you want is to catch them at a bad time. The good news is that there’s an optimal time for every audience, and we’re going to help you find it.

When Should You Send Cold Email?

It always helps to start with hard numbers. Various studies (including this one by CoSchedule) have concluded that emails sent between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. tend to receive the most opens, and peak opens happen around 10 a.m. In the same study, Tuesdays were declared the best day to get your emails opened.

This information makes sense based on the way people behave in the office.

Mondays can be a bit of a slow start. People are coming back in from the weekend and their inboxes might be clogged up – they might not even have an opportunity to see your email, let alone interact with it. Tuesdays offer the comfort of having been readjusted to a routine, while not so close to the weekend that one might be easily distracted again.

Therefore, if you’re starting out with cold email campaigns to a purchased list of B2B contacts, it stands to reason that you should start by scheduling your campaigns to go out Tuesday mornings at 10 a.m.

The problem with using a rule of thumb is it’s just that – a rule of thumb. This may be the optimal sending time for a certain audience that adheres to regular office hours in a certain industry, but it’s not going to be the optimal time to reach every audience.

This isn’t to say that Tuesday at 10 a.m. won’t be the best time to send your cold email campaigns – it very well could be. But if you’re targeting an audience of people that typically work midnights or are regularly in over the weekend, you might want to put yourself in your (potential) customer’s shoes.

Every Audience (Including Yours) Is Different

After you’ve had some time to identify what time you think your audience is most likely to open your email, you’re off to a great start. But don’t just set it and forget it.

You absolutely should schedule your email to go out at the time you think you’re going to receive the most opens, but that shouldn’t be the only time you’re scheduling your campaign. It’s best practice to A/B test these sorts of changes. After all, you won’t know what the best time is unless you’ve gathered some data.

Segment your audience. Send one campaign at that coveted Tuesday at 10 a.m. time and another in the time slot you think could work for your audience. Record your findings and see which campaign received a higher open rate. Then, compare the winner with a new sending time. Remember, your emails can always perform better, so it’s important that you continue to test your findings against new experiments.

It’s also important to note that different circumstances can impact when people are most likely to open their emails. At the time of writing this post, many people have adopted a hybrid or work-from-home model. They might not be as inclined to open an email early in the morning as they once were. Just another reason why testing is always important to determine the best time to send cold email.

Make Sure Your Campaign is Reaching Your Audience

Of course, you’re only able to track your opens if your email is making it to your audience to begin with. When sending cold email, it’s extremely important that your deliverability is high, so you can track your progress and make changes and adjustments where necessary.

Sending a cold email is a unique opportunity compared to an opted-in list, but it also comes with unique obstacles. That’s where we come in. We at Clickback know these obstacles better than anyone, and we can help you overcome them. Clickback sends your campaigns using proprietary IPs and domains, keeping you safe throughout the process. We clean your email list at no additional charge, so you only send to valid contacts that will want to engage with your content. We even warn you about potential problem areas of your campaigns that might get you caught up in spam filters.

Clickback is the ideal tool for reaching a purchased list of contacts the right way and provides you with the expert assistance, analytics and reporting tools needed to fine-tune and optimize your campaigns. To see how Clickback can help you reach your purchased list, sign up for a free 1-on-1 demo and widen your sales funnel today.