MBA1225 Q&A Wednesday: Is there a best time to send emails to my list?
2 Feb 2026 · 7 min
Omar Zenhom answers Harry's question about the best time to email a list. There's no universal answer, but avoid evenings and late Fridays for B2B audiences. Test send times against your actual open and response rates, and use your email software to send by recipient time zone.
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Hey, welcome to the $100 RMBA show. A better Business. Just an episode away with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. On our Q and a Wednesday episode, I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over@omar mba.net and today's question is from Harry and Harry asks, is there a best time to send my emails to my email list? Harry's talking about sending his email newsletters, his campaigns, his automations. Is there a specific time that these emails should be sent to the list so that they're read or they're opened? It's a good question and a question I'm sure all of us ask ourselves before we hit that scheduled button or that send button when we're ready to send an email to our list. Depending on what your email marketing software is, there are options out there. Some tips I can give you when it comes to sending it at the right time for your recipients to maximize open rates and even if your email marketing does not have that option, I'M going to give you some tips as well. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. In today's Q and A Wednesday, Harry asks, when is the best time to send my emails to my email list? If you're sending out a daily or a weekly newsletter, a marketing campaign, even automations, you might be asking, when is the best time I should Send these emails? 8:00' clock in the morning? Are Sundays a no go? When's the best time to send them so the recipients read them? Well, first we have to recognize the fact that we have to understand who the recipients are and where they're located. You might have people on your email list around the world. So if you say 8:00am Eastern time, that may not be the case for the recipient. For many email marketing softwares like ActiveCampaign or Infusionsoft, they allow you to send an email according to the time of the recipient. Now how is that dictated? Well, when the person signs up for your email list, that email marketing software will try to capture their location via their IP address. Now mind you, this is not flawless because they could be signing up for your email list when they're traveling or when they're using a vpn. But for the most part this is pretty accurate. And with this option you could say send this email at 8am on Monday and it will send it based on their own location and not yours. So if you do have that option, I would steer clear from sending emails in the evening or having them receive it in the evening, late Friday afternoon and Saturdays, because those are usually days where people are off email. Having said that, it's still totally fine because hey, email is not a phone call they're not going to pick up at a certain time and it's still going to be in their inbox ready for them when they're ready to read their email. It's just that sometimes people find that when you send it at peak times during work hours, people are more ready to read your email. And this is especially important if your emails are time sensitive. Like you're running a promotion and it's like a 24 hour promotion and you send it at a day or time where they're just not going to be able to read it. But if there is no time sensitivity, then this is not a huge deal and I would probably recommend really taking a look at the history of your email. So if you've been sending emails to your list for a while, take a look at what times you've been sending these emails and the open rates and which time has been giving you the best open rate. Now again, this is not a surefire thing because they could be opening it because the subject line is brilliant, not the time. And to be quite honest, if I'm going to give you the most sound advice, the content, the actual information and how well it's written is really the most important thing. The time you send it is really not that important. And I haven't seen a real effect on open rates and response rates based on when I send an email. And I've experimented a lot when it comes to this. Again, the only exception is if it's a time sensitive thing like a promotion. So I wouldn't worry so much. But if you want to start trying things out again, I would steer clear from Friday nights or evenings or late afternoon Saturday and try to stay in the work week. And then why don't you try Saturday and see the difference? Try on a Sunday morning and see the difference. I also want to mention this has a lot to do with the audience itself. If you're a B2B company, meaning that you're serving other businesses, then the work week is probably your best shot. But say, for example, you're Airbnb, your product or service is recreation. People are checking their emails on the weekend, their personal emails for those types of newsletters. That's not work for them, that's pleasure. And the weekend may be perfect for them. So you got to know your audience and the short answer is you have to experiment. I wish I can give you a surefire answer like, hey, 9am Monday is the best, but that's just not business. You got to cater it to your audience and you know your audience best. And the best way to know for sure and to know your audience best is to experiment. But again, having said all that, I wouldn't worry so much about the time. I would worry about the content and how well it's written. That's really what's going to affect your response rate, your open rate, and how much they enjoy getting emails from you. I would really focus on that because you want to keep people on your email list and keep them engaged, even if they're not customers.
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To wrap up today's Q and A Wednesday's Question from Harry when is the best time to send an email to my list? You're gonna have to experiment here because your audience is different than mine. But through the experimentation, you're trying to increase your open rates, your read rates, your response rates by a few percent. The time is really not gonna make a huge difference. If you want to see major differences split test content and subject lines, those really make a difference. I hope that helps Harry and everybody else who's listening. If you have a question you wan, just email me over@omar00mba.net and I'll answer right here on Q and A Wednesday. Don't forget to hit subscribe on whatever you like to use to listen to. Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Castbox. We're on them all. Hit subscribe and never miss a beat. The next episode gets downloaded to your device automatically, so it's ready for you to listen whenever you're ready. Before I go, I want to leave you with this Marketing is all about experimentation. Whether it's email marketing, Facebook marketing, even marketing offline. Seeing if it works, testing things out, tweaking things, improving things. It's going to take some time for you to perfect it. There's no silver, bro, so take your time when you're marketing and make sure you test it out thoroughly. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.
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