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There is no single best or worst time to send every email. For marketing campaigns and newsletters, choose a time based on the audience and the result you want—opens, clicks, or conversions—then test it with your own subscribers. Recent platform benchmarks suggest that the time associated with more opens may differ from the time associated with more clicks.

What is the best time to send emails?

The useful answer is a starting window, not a universal clock time. The strongest evidence in the available benchmarks comes from email-platform datasets, which describe what happened among those platforms’ customers; they do not prove that sending at the same time will improve results for every list.

MailerLite analyzed 2,138,817 campaigns sent through its platform from the US, UK, Australia, and Canada between December 2024 and November 2025. In its data, weekday open-rate peaks commonly fell between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. in recipients’ local time, while click peaks often fell between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. Thursday and Friday were exceptions to those reported patterns. MailerLite identified Friday at 6 p.m. as a slot where its measured open and click peaks coincided. Treat these as candidate windows from that dataset, not a prescription for your audience. MailerLite’s analysis

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MailerLite also reported a 49.72% average open rate and an 8.09% average click rate on Fridays in its 2025 data. Those are platform-specific averages, and open and click rates measure different behaviors; they are not a promise of what an individual campaign will achieve.

What is the best time to send email newsletters?

For a newsletter, start by deciding what success means. If the aim is readership, opens may be an initial signal; if the email should drive readers to an article, product, or signup, clicks or downstream conversions are more relevant. A time associated with more opens need not be the time associated with more clicks.

MailerLite’s morning-open and evening-click patterns can help define test windows. They should not be treated as newsletter-specific rules: its dataset covers campaigns, and the evidence does not establish that every campaign type or audience behaves alike.

Why benchmarks disagree about the best day

Different datasets study different senders, periods, geographies, and metrics. Their findings are useful context, but they cannot be combined into a single universal ranking of weekdays.

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  • MailerLite, 2025: Its platform analysis covered campaigns sent in four countries from December 2024 to November 2025. It reported the time-of-day patterns above. See its methodology and findings.
  • Seventh Sense, 2026: It reported on 700+ million marketing emails sent through HubSpot and Marketo customer portals between January 2024 and May 2026. Its median open-rate figures were 22.4% on Tuesday and 17.4% on Saturday—a five-percentage-point difference in that dataset. This is vendor-reported observational data, not evidence that Tuesday will outperform Saturday for another sender. Read Seventh Sense’s report.
  • GDMA, 2026: Its benchmark covered 17.7 million campaigns and 847 billion emails, using anonymized 2021–2025 data across 61 countries. The announcement describes campaign sending spreading across more days and weekends. It reports sending behavior, not proof that any particular day performs best. Read the GDMA announcement.
  • Smart Search, 2022: A HubSpot-hosted survey graphic says 34.9% of surveyed US marketers selected 9 a.m.–noon as the time window with the most engagement. That is an older survey of marketers’ reported observations, not current recipient-level behavior; the graphic cautions that results vary by study, behavior, and target metric. View the survey graphic.

These figures should not be compared as if they came from one controlled experiment. Each source reflects its own participants, definitions, and measurement approach. None establishes a universally worst weekday.

How to find the right send time for your audience

  1. Choose the outcome first. Decide whether you are optimizing for opens, clicks, or a downstream action such as a purchase or signup. Judge the timing test against the campaign’s intended outcome rather than opens alone.
  2. Choose plausible time windows. Use relevant benchmarks as hypotheses, then account for your audience’s geography, industry, and habits. Schedule against recipients’ local time where possible, rather than assuming your own time zone suits a geographically distributed list.
  3. Compare similar sends. Test send time as the main variable. Keep the message, audience selection, and delivery conditions as consistent as practical so that a difference is easier to interpret. Klaviyo recommends testing send time instead of relying only on past aggregate performance. See Klaviyo’s testing guidance.
  4. Evaluate the intended metric. Compare the result for the behavior you chose to improve, and allow for normal variation between campaigns. A timing change that lifts opens but not the action the campaign is meant to generate may not be a meaningful improvement.
  5. Keep testing when the audience or campaign changes. Results from one list, season, or message type may not transfer cleanly to another. Reassess timing when the audience, geography, or campaign goal materially changes.

A fair comparison needs enough comparable deliveries to make the result interpretable. The cited sources do not establish a universal minimum list size or testing duration, so avoid treating a small or uneven comparison as definitive.

Does individualized send time help?

Instead of choosing one broad slot, some systems attempt to predict when each recipient is more likely to engage. A 2020 paper evaluated an individualized time-to-open prediction method on emails sent to one million customers over five months. It supports recipient-level timing as a research direction, but it does not establish that a particular vendor feature will improve every sender’s business outcomes. Read the paper.

Individualized timing is worth considering only when your email platform supports it and you have a clear way to assess its effect. Check the outcome that matters to the campaign; a prediction or higher open rate alone is not proof of better business results.

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Do the same recommendations apply to one-to-one email?

Not necessarily. The evidence discussed here primarily concerns marketing campaigns, not personal messages or one-to-one business correspondence. For an individual recipient, urgency, their working hours, and the context of the conversation are more useful guides than a broad campaign benchmark.

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