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There is no single best or worst time to send emails. The right window depends on what you want recipients to do, who they are, and where they are. Published benchmarks can help you choose test times, but your own audience’s response is the better guide.
What is the best time to send emails?
Start with the campaign’s goal. A time associated with more opens may not be the time associated with more clicks or purchases. Choose the metric that reflects the result you want, then compare send windows using that metric rather than treating opens as proof of success.
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For one-to-one business correspondence, the recipient’s working hours and context matter more than marketing-campaign benchmarks. The available timing studies primarily analyze marketing emails, not individual business messages.
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MailerLite analyzed 2,138,817 campaigns sent through its platform from the US, UK, Australia, and Canada between December 2024 and November 2025. In that observational dataset, weekday open-rate peaks commonly fell between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. local time, while click peaks often fell between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. Thursday and Friday differed from those patterns; MailerLite identified Friday at 6 p.m. as a time when measured open and click peaks coincided. These are findings within MailerLite’s campaign data, not universal prescriptions. MailerLite’s 2025 analysis also reports an average Friday open rate of 49.72% and average Friday click rate of 8.09%; those are platform-specific averages, and its article distinguishes average campaign rates from total rates.
#1 Best Overall
Other datasets do not point to one winning day. Seventh Sense reports medians from more than 700 million marketing emails sent through HubSpot and Marketo customer portals between January 2024 and May 2026: Tuesday’s median open rate was 22.4%, compared with 17.4% on Saturday. This vendor-reported observational result describes its own dataset, not a guarantee for another list. Seventh Sense’s analysis therefore cannot be directly compared with MailerLite’s averages, which use a different population and reporting approach.
The GDMA’s 2026 benchmark covers 17.7 million campaigns and 847 billion emails, using anonymized data from 2021–2025 across 61 countries. Its announcement describes campaigns spreading across more days and weekends. That is evidence about sending behavior, not proof that weekends perform better. GDMA’s announcement does not establish a universally best day.
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An older HubSpot-hosted survey graphic says 34.9% of surveyed US marketers selected 9 a.m.–noon as the window with the most engagement. That is marketers’ reported observation from a 2022 survey, not current recipient-level behavior, and its own graphic cautions that findings vary by study, behavior, and target metric. View the survey graphic.
What is the best time to send email newsletters?
For newsletters, use the same decision rule: test times against the outcome the newsletter is meant to drive. If the goal is readership, track meaningful readership measures available to you; if it is traffic, prioritize clicks to relevant pages. A morning open peak is a reasonable candidate to test, and an evening click peak may be another, based on MailerLite’s data—but neither is a universal answer.
Audience context can shift results. Consider whether subscribers are consumers or business readers, their industry and habits, and the time zones where they receive the newsletter. A campaign scheduled according to the sender’s clock may arrive at an unhelpful hour for recipients in another region.
How to test send times fairly
- Choose one primary outcome. Decide whether the campaign is meant to generate opens, clicks, or downstream conversions, and use that outcome to judge the test.
- Select a small set of plausible windows. Use published benchmarks only to nominate candidates—for example, morning and evening windows from MailerLite’s dataset—not as promised winners.
- Keep the comparison like-for-like. Compare similar messages and audience selections, and change send time rather than also changing content or targeting. Klaviyo recommends testing send time as the variable instead of relying only on aggregate historical performance. Klaviyo’s guidance discusses this approach.
- Account for delivery context. Use recipient time zones where possible, and ensure each test group is treated comparably. If the audience is too small or campaign conditions differ substantially, the result may not identify a reliable winner.
- Use the result for the audience and goal tested. A winning slot for one segment or campaign objective does not automatically apply to other subscribers or future messages.
Practitioner experience also cautions against assuming a fixed result: Klaviyo quotes Joseph Hsieh, Founder and Chief Marketer at Retention Commerce, saying, “From the many Smart Send Time tests, my results vary by merchant and audiences,” in its timing article. That is a practitioner’s account, not a controlled-study result.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Should you personalize send time for each recipient?
Individualized timing may be useful when a sender has enough engagement data and a system capable of delivering messages at recipient-specific times. A 2020 paper evaluated an individualized time-to-open prediction method using emails sent to one million customers over five months. It supports the research direction of predicting recipient-level timing, but it does not prove that any vendor feature will improve every sender’s business outcomes. Read the paper.
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Whether timing is broad or individualized, measure the behavior that matters to the campaign. An optimization that increases opens is not necessarily valuable if it does not improve the desired downstream result.
Is there a worst day or time to send?
No weekday is established as universally worst. Results differ across datasets, audiences, and metrics: Seventh Sense reports lower Saturday median opens than Tuesday in its dataset, while GDMA describes more sending across weekends without claiming weekend performance is better or worse. Use a “worst” label only for a specific audience, metric, and test—not as a general rule.
The available benchmarks are largely observational platform data. Their customers, email types, geographies, and measurement definitions differ, so figures across sources are not direct comparisons and do not establish a causal uplift from changing send time.
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