Ryan Dohrn explains why there's no universal perfect time to send sales emails. Avoid 10 am and 2 pm meeting windows. His data shows Tuesday through Thursday work best, with Wednesday as his sweet spot, and Saturday mornings surprisingly effective. Test timing against your own prospects instead of following generic guru advice.
What's going on, friends and fans? Ryan Dohrn here, your friendly neighborhood sales coach. We're answering your listener questions sent in to ryan@ryandohrn.com. And gosh, we do our best. We get a lot of questions. I love them. We'll try to either respond to you by email, throw you here on a video or a podcast. But if I don't reply and you sent over a question, I didn't get it because I reply to all of them. I love them. All right. Next question comes from Tara in Fort Myers. I'm guessing that's Fort Myers, Florida. Hey, Tara. Hey Ryan, I'm being told I just got off a webinar and I'm being told that there is no perfect send times for sales emails. You talk about send times all the time. Who's right and who's wrong? Tara, I'm right. I'm always right. Tara, here's what I can promise to you. I have to sell a couple million bucks a year myself, and I will never share things that are theories. I only talk about things that are real. I don't like to pontificate. I like to talk. And I always have a little bit of an ego that I'm dragging behind, right? But I wanna make sure that you know from my mouth to God's ears, my heart to yours, you know, that I'll never share anything with you that I'm not actively doing, okay? So I'm sure from a mass email perspective, there probably is not the perfect day or the perfect time. Now I've been told Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are better days. I've been told mornings and afternoons, early evening are better. But then again, I've had some great luck sending emails on Saturday mornings, you know, crazy as that may sound. So here's what I try to do. Let's back up a second, Tara from Florida. What I wanna do is think about what does my customer's day look like? So follow me on this, friends. What does my customer's day look like? So if my customer that I'm reaching out to is somebody in a service industry, well, more than likely they're starting at 7 o'clock, they're getting their trucks out in the field by 8, they just sit down at their computer by 9. Do you want to be the first person in their inbox? Maybe, maybe not at 9 o'clock. So maybe you try to structure it so your emails hit at the top of their inbox at 10 AM, just as an example. What you don't want to do with somebody like that that's out in the field all day, so to speak, is email them at noon. Someone was on Facebook— I won't say his name, but you should ignore him— um, he's like, oh, hit people at noon at lunch. Well, there's nothing that frustrates me more than like getting a bunch of email when at lunchtime when I'm trying to catch up. Right? So you might just want to consider what does your customer's day look like. Now, in corporate America— Google it if you don't believe me— the most— the 2 most common times for meetings are 10 AM and 2 PM. So because 10 and 2 are the 2 most common meeting times, I don't want my emails to hit at 10 or 2. So most meetings are an hour, so I don't want to be in the morning because I don't want to be in delete mode. Most people get to work, they're like in delete mode. So I don't do 8, 9, 10 o'clock as meetings. So maybe 11, 11:15. I get great responses then. I don't like people interrupting my lunch. Kind of makes me cranky, right? And then I know that another common meeting time is 2 o'clock. So you could hit at 1, you could hit at 3. I would say definitely not after 5. But if you want to be really strategic and you get a good response, maybe use delayed delivery or send later and have something hit on Saturday morning. I'm amazed at how many emails I get from a prospecting perspective, or replies I get on Saturday morning. I don't do anything on Sundays. I'm trying to chill. I think everybody else is kind of, you know, as well. So here would be my consideration and my best advice to you, Tara: watch your customers, adjust your email schedule to your customer's email, and don't follow the advice of people on Facebook or Instagram that claim to be a guru. Anybody— some— anytime somebody says they're a guru, I think I'm going to run in the other direction. Guru is like run the other way. And look at your customers' lives and try to be in alignment with your customers' lives, not your life. One final thought. You might be, Tara, a 5 AM kind of person. Totally cool. Good for you, by the way. But if you're sending emails at 5 AM, nobody's receiving those going, wow, look at Tara, she really gets at it. Early bird gets the worm. You know, instead they're probably looking at that email like, 5 AM? What in the world? Right? So you want to be strategic of when you hit people's inboxes to be at the top of the inbox at the most appropriate time for the person that you're sending it to. So Tara, I hope that advice helps. And let me know, reach back out and let me know what your send times look like. I would share with you, I don't get great email replies on Mondays or Fridays. I get much better replies Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Wednesday is a pretty good day for me, uh, when I'm sending out those emails. So Tara, I hope that's helpful. Tara and everybody, don't forget, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it. Uh, and they're not, we're not crazy friends. This is a great career. It will feed your family for a lifetime. I promise. Folks, I'd love to come to your sales meeting, your national meeting, get your team all pumped up. Reach out to me over at ryandohrn.com. All right, friends, we'll see you next time.
