In our group, we often get asked, “What time/day does your church send its weekly email?”
Email is important. It’s one of the best ways to communicate quickly and easily with your congregation, but abuse it, and you’ll quickly see your open and click-through rates drop.
Here’s the thing: there is no wrong or right time or day to send email. It really depends on your audience and what works for them. You’ll probably have to test and test again.
But you’re here, so let’s get to some facts.
This article will tell you:
✅ The best time of day to send email.
✅ The best day of the week to send email.
What is the best time to send an email? Morning or evening?
The stats below came directly from CoSchedule, who compiled them various studies.
- The best time is 10 AM. Several studies concluded the best time is 10 AM, another notable time is 11 AM.
- The next best time is actually a timespan—8 PM through midnight. Emails are usually opened and clicked more in the evening than any other time of day.
- Another great time is 2 PM because people are looking for distraction from their work.
- The last best time to send email, according to CoSchedule, is 6 AM. People just love waking up with some sweet emails.
But even with these stats, the best time for your congregation may just be 4 PM. The only way to find out is to test multiple different times. These are good starter points for testing though.
What is the best day to send email?
Our group says Wednesday is the best day to send a church-wide email, but Wednesday comes in third place in CoSchedule’s research.
- Tuesday
- Thursday
- Wednesday
How can you find out the best time for your church to send an email?
Test it! Try following a schedule and analyze the results. Tools like MailChimp make this super easy to do, but if you don’t have MailChimp and your church uses a Church Management System to send email you might be able to get this data by using a service like SendGrid.
Also test sending out different subject lines, using plain text instead of HTML, etc. Plenty of ways to increase your open and click-through rates.
What’s working for members of our group
Marion Koleski: Weekly, Fridays, about a 30% open rate. No pastor blurb, it’s just an electronic version of the bulletin.
Reba Baskett: Weekly, Friday with about 50% open rate.
Nicole French: We send every other week on Tuesday afternoons. Last I checked, we were at about a 40% open rate.
Alicia Alexander Hassinger: I guess we are unique. Saturday at 8 AM. 40%+ open rate consistently.
Adam McLaughlin: Saturday, weekly.
Amy Solava: Weekly, on Tuesdays.
So what works best for you? Share your results and how you got your email rates up in the group!
