You’d better send your marketing emails weekly on Saturday mornings. Then it will get the most clicks and least unsubscribes. That is what the statistics tell us.

MailChimp, the email-marketing service, scanned through 10 billion emails as part of their Email Genome Project. Their findings were surprising. Dan Zarrella of HubSpot put together an interesting webinar from the data (see his slides embedded below). In my opinion the main points – or as Dan would probably say: The super-duper-DUPER-important key takeaways are:

• Click-through rates spike on weekend. Marketing emails will get more share of mind when people have less work to attend to. Or is it just because very few companies send their messages on weekends, and those who do will get noticed?
• The unsubscribe rates are highest on Mon and Tue. Don’t send your messages in the beginning of the week! It is the busiest time of week for so many people.
• The actual time of day is not that important. But sending email early morning (around 7am) is slightly better than other times.
• If you want people to click a link on your email, you’d better have a LOTS of links. More links equals higher overall click through rate. Dan’s rationale is that the more links there are, the more ways you have to convince the reader. All of the links may of course point to the same url.
• High frequency is not a bad thing. The unsubscribe rate is at highest if you send email only once or twice a month. Sending daily is no worse than sending weekly (in terms of unsubscribe rate). Thus high frequency outweighs any decline in click rates.