Best Day to Send Email Marketing Messages

EROI.com has come out with a new survey on the best day of the week to send email for marketing purposes.

For business customers, the best day is Tuesday.  The worst days:  Thursday and Friday.

For consumer customers, pretty much the opposite holds true: the best day is Friday.

But these statistics bear some explanation.

My own experience with my email newsletter is that Thursdays and Fridays are actually good days to send email to entrepreneurs and small business owners / managers.  I’ve found that open rates for email delivered on those days, can be as much as 5% points higher than email delivered on Mondays.  And when you are dealing with open rates at around 40% as I am, an extra 5% is huge.

Why the discrepancy?  It goes back to something I’ve said numerous times before.  When it comes to their purchasing behaviors, small business owners and entrepreneurs often behave more akin to consumers than to Fortune 500 employees. 

That’s especially true the smaller the business.  When you are dealing with small businesses of 10 employees and under, all the way down to sole proprietors, the business owner tends to research purchases and make buying decisions more like a consumer.  He or she tends to want more self-serve options.  Online research sources written in plain English are more important.  Product and service choices tend to have more overlap with consumer products and services than with enterprise versions. 

And how the small business owner uses his or her time tends to follow consumer patterns.  Often the weekends are prime time to look at new products and catch up on newsletter reading, whereas on the weekdays they are caught up in running their businesses.  In the case of my newsletter, I’ve noticed, for instance, a nice percentage of the opens come over the weekend.  Saturday morning and Sunday evening both bring blips in open rates.

If owners and managers in very small businesses behave more like consumers, then you have to try to reach them more like how you reach consumers.  

Lesson:  perhaps the B-to-C statistic is more relevant when trying to reach small business owners, than the B-to-B statistic. 

I would be interested to hear others’ experiences.  Is my situation unusual, or do you have similar experiences when emailing small business owners?

Hat tip to Chris Brown at Branding and Marketing blog for the link.