The Best Days and Times to Send Cold Emails (The Ultimate Answer for Salespeople)

Are you planning to send cold emails but aren’t sure what’s the best time to do it? Looking for advice on specific days or times to send cold email outreach to maximize results?

You know – I think that email is just beyond amazing for when you want to kickstart a new conversation with a prospect. It’s the channel to use if you want to easily research potential customers, and send a highly personalized messages to them in a matter of minutes. 

But let’s face it; great as sales outreach is, there is a problem with it too and it has a lot to do with when you send your emails. Reach out to a prospect on a wrong day and your sales email will, most likely, get completely ignored. But do the same when the prospect is more likely to read it, and your chances that they will open your email go up significantly. 

The problem? How do you know when’s the best time to send cold emails? 

In this guide, we’ll look at various research findings and statistics to determine the best time and the best day of the week to send cold emails to prospects. 

So, without any further ado, let’s begin. 

Why Email Timing is So Important to Outreach Success?

I admit, at first sight, the idea of aiming to send sales emails on a specific day seems, well, a little weird. How could a simple thing such as timing affect your email’s success, after all? Aren’t things like email subject lines, opening sentences, or calls to action more important?

Well, they are important, of course. But they aren’t the only factors that affect your email campaign’s open rate or its overall success rate. 

And yes, when you send the email matters quite a lot too. 

Think about it. You’ve crafted an amazing email. You know that it’s practically impossible for a prospect to ignore your subject line. And once they open the message, the first sentence will literally draw them in to reading more. 

So, you hit send. You’re excited. You can’t wait to hear back from them but … they never reply. 

Again, you know that it couldn’t be because of your message. 

So, what happened?

One possible scenario is that you sent the email during the day in your time zone. Unfortunately, your prospect might have been vastly asleep when the message landed in their inbox. And unfortunately, by the time they got up, it was buried with tens of other emails. Coupled with their busy schedule that day, your email got ignored. 

We see companies making this mistake quite often. They schedule outreach emails to go out on Monday morning, but it’s Monday morning their time. Unfortunately, when the messages go out, it’s already past the end of the business day for their prospects on the other side of the globe. 

The result? Far few opens and even fewer responses. 

But time zones are just one issue here. Your target audience’s daily schedules play a role in the campaign’s success too. The same goes for days of the week. As you’ll see from the data I quoted below, we are less likely to read emails on Monday, for example. And certainly, I don’t feel like doing so on a Friday afternoon…

So, without any further ado, let’s see what are the best days and times to send cold emails, according to research.

The Best Days to Send Cold Emails 

The data differs greatly here, depending on the source. 

For example, Siegemedia analyzed their outreach campaign performance and discovered that emails sent at the start of the week achieved a far better open rate. 

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On the other hand, Thursdays worked better for Moosend. 

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However, there is a major difference between the two data sets that might explain the difference. 

SiegeMedia analyzed actual outreach. In their case, emails they evaluated were all related to link building outreach. Moosend, on the other hand, looked at email newsletter performance.

A similar research by Campaign Monitor mirrors this data.

According to Campaign Monitor, emails sent on Monday receive the highest open rate. Those sent on Thursday, however, achieve the highest click to open rates. 

(image source)

The data would suggest that, for sales emails, the start of the week is a perfect time to reach out to prospects. 

Again, when we look at a typical buyer behavior into account, the data makes sense too. 

Because, let’s face it; we’re far more likely to engage in work-related conversations at the start of the week. As the week draws to a close, our interest in solving business problems wanes significantly, replaced by considerations regarding our personal lives. It’s no surprise, then, that this is the time we tend to focus more on information in newsletters, rather than cold emails.

(That said, some sales reps report successful experiments with sending cold emails on weekends. It’s worth noting that these were, typically, messages further down in the sequence, not the first outreach email.)

But what about a specific time of the day? Is there a time that works better for sending cold emails? 

Let’s take a look at what the research has to say about it.

The Best Time to Send Cold Emails

When it comes to the most ideal time of the day to send emails, the data seems to agree. 

Overall, it looks like the early hours of the day are the most optimal time, particularly when it comes to achieving higher email open rates. Having said that, studies suggest different time windows to use:

• The aforementioned research by SiegeMedia, for example, suggests sending emails between 6 and 9am. 
• Moosend suggests a slightly narrower window of 8-9 am.
• GetResponse also suggests that early in the morning works best. According to the company’s research, the highest open rate occurs around 4am while click to open rate between 7 and 9 am. 

(image source)

A Quick Analysis – What Does This Mean to Your Cold Email Campaign

I have to be upfront with you – I’m not a data scientist. I’m sure there are people who could draw far better conclusions from this data than me. 

But using my experience in sending cold emails, and what we’ve learned from our customers as well, it’s clear that it matches our usual behavior at work. 

• Our focus is better early in the week, at least when it comes to solving business issues. 
• The closer we get to the weekend, the more likely we are to think of things outside of the office.
• We’re also more likely to read emails early in the morning, before the busyness of the day steals our attention for good.

Taking the above into consideration, I think it’s safe to say that it’s worth testing cold email performance early in the week, and make sure that your emails reach prospects early in the morning. 

Tools for Scheduling Sales Emails

I’m sure you know this already but it’s worth repeating – Most sales outreach tools, like Postaga, allow you to specify the exact time at which you want your emails to go out. 

With such tools, you can set up even the most complex outreach cadences and control when those emails land in your prospects’ inboxes. 

And this scheduling is super easy to set up. 

To do so, you just need to select the day and time from a calendar menu when setting up the campaign. The software will automatically deliver your emails at that time, using intervals you specified when designing your outreach sequence. 

What’s more, Postaga allows you to prevent emails from being sent on weekends. This means that even if one of your follow ups falls on a weekend, the tool will reschedule it to a business day.

However, if you’d like to experiment with scheduling one or two messages in the sequence to reach your prospects on a weekend, you just need to deactivate that feature and Postaga will deliver messages outside of the workweek as well.

(Email scheduling features in Postaga)

Key takeaways

• Early of the week seems to be an ideal time for reaching new prospects
• Emails sent early in the week promise better open and reply rates
• You can schedule emails precisely with sales outreach tools like Postaga.

Want to launch an email outreach campaign? Check out Postaga, the dedicated outreach software for sales teams.