What is the best time to send email?

For most senders, mid-morning on a weekday, about 9 to 11 a.m. in the recipient's local time zone, is the safest starting point. Confirm by testing against your own list.

What is the best day to send email?

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday come up most often, with Tuesday and Thursday slightly favored for opens and clicks. Differences are usually small, so treat day of week as a variable to test.

Should I send emails in my time zone or the recipient's?

Use the recipient's time zone whenever possible. Time-zone-aware sending delivers to each contact's local clock so the campaign lands in the intended window.

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The best time to send email

Q: Do open rates still tell me when to send?

Less reliably than they used to. Privacy features can auto-trigger opens, inflating the metric. Judge send time primarily by clicks and downstream conversions.

Most datasets offer a starting window, not a rule. Recent analyses disagree on the best day and show that opens and clicks can peak hours apart. Use your audience, time zone, and conversion goal to choose two plausible send windows, then test them with every other variable held constant.

Choose send windows to test

Brevo recommends Tuesday or Thursday as starting points in its email marketing guide. MailerLite analyzed 2,138,817 campaigns sent from December 2024 through November 2025 and found Friday had the highest average open and click rates. It also found opens usually peaked in the morning while clicks often peaked in the evening. These are different sources and measures. Choose two windows to test with your audience.

Source: Brevo, email marketing guide

Source: MailerLite, The Best Time to Send Email in 2026 (2,138,817 campaigns)

Best time by audience type

B2B

Start with weekday business hours, then test morning against early afternoon. Work audiences often read around the workday, but the click window can differ from the open window.

B2C

Test evenings and weekends instead of assuming business hours. Personal-inbox behavior varies by audience, and recent datasets show that opens and clicks can peak at different times.

Newsletters

Choose a slot your audience can recognize and your team can sustain. Then test whether a different window improves clicks or conversions.

Product, lifecycle & transactional

Use behavior when the message follows a product action. A welcome email fires on signup. A usage nudge fires when the in-product signal happens. That event is a better starting point than a benchmark hour.

How to find the best time for your audience

For an audience across time zones, compare equivalent local windows. Use a repeatable test plan:

Choose one audience segment and one goal. Do not mix regions, lifecycle stages, or objectives in the same result.
If your platform does not deliver in each recipient’s local time, segment by region and schedule separate sends so the comparison is fair.
Change only the send window. Keep the audience, subject, sender, and message fixed, then compare clicks or goal conversions after a full measurement window.
For behavior-triggered email, use Loops Workflows. An Experiment node can split contacts into timer variants, and the workflow metrics show sends, opens, and clicks for each branch.

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Timing is a smaller lever than relevance

Send-time studies combine different audiences, so their winning hours often disagree. Timing can help at the margin.
Start with relevance and segmentation. The right message to the right person usually matters more than the hour.
For scheduled campaigns, deliver in the recipient’s local time. If your tool cannot do that automatically, split the audience by region.
Use behavior-triggered lifecycle email when an action supplies the timing signal.

💡

Timing is a smaller lever than relevance

Send-time studies combine different audiences, so their winning hours often disagree. Timing can help at the margin.
Start with relevance and segmentation. The right message to the right person usually matters more than the hour.
For scheduled campaigns, deliver in the recipient’s local time. If your tool cannot do that automatically, split the audience by region.
Use behavior-triggered lifecycle email when an action supplies the timing signal.

Common myths about email send times

Studies do not support one universal best time. Treat the consensus window as a hypothesis to test.
Weekend performance depends on the audience, so test Saturday and Sunday before ruling them out.
Check list quality, audience selection, and message relevance before interpreting a timing result.
Re-test as the audience and product mature. A winning window can drift.
Open rate is noisy. Apple Mail Privacy Protection can preload tracking pixels, so judge timing with clicks and conversions.

FAQ

What’s the best time to send email?

What’s the best day to send email?

What’s the best time for marketing emails?

Should I use my time zone or the recipient’s?

How do I find my own best send time?

Do open rates still tell me when to send?

Next: learn how to run an email A/B test, then use lifecycle email for behavior-triggered timing.

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