You spend a lot of time marketing your business.
You have to, of course.
To find deals, to close deals, to get future referrals… you have to market — you have to send out direct mailers, email buyers and sellers, even cold call new potential prospects.
The worst thing that could happen is that those marketing efforts don’t pay off — that you spend 20 hours this week marketing your business, but the results aren’t equal to the effort you put in.
(Happens more often than you might think)
Because, here’s the thing, good marketing is in the details. Great marketers study the best subject lines for their emails, the best opening phrases for their cold calls, and even the best time of day to interact with their prospects.
They test, iterate, and test again.
Buuut… that takes a lot of time.
So to help you make your marketing campaigns more effective (without spending hundreds of hours testing), I’ve scoured the internet for the best time of day to email your prospects and cold call your prospects.
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Does time of day really make much of a difference?
Yes. It does.
(onward!)
Okay, okay — let me explain.
When you call someone or when you send someone an email definitely makes a difference. It might not be the single biggest determining factor of response rate (unless you go from cold calling at midnight to cold calling at noon), but it does have an impact.
To illustrate, just think about your own life.
If I wanted to call you and tell you about Call Porter’s new line of self-driving cars (this does not exist. But this would be awesome), when would be the best time to get a hold of you? When would you be most likely to not only answer the phone, but listen to what I have to say?
If you’re like most people, then anytime past 9pm is a no-go. So too is anytime between 7am and 10am (most people are on their way to work and settling into their daily rhythm).
When would be the best?
5pm, before dinner but after the bulk of work?
7pm, after dinner but before it’s too late to be weird?
Or at noon, during your lunch break?
The same goes for email — if I send an email at midnight, the prospect might still see it, but it won’t be at the top of their likely cluttered inbox when they check (and thus it’s easier to pass over).
What you send in an email or say on a call matters. Who you call or who you email matters. And when you email or cold call matters just as much.
So…
When should you do it?
The best time of day to send emails
CoSchedule did a lot of the heavy-lifting for us. They looked at 14 different studies, compiled them into a single data set, and determined the best day and time to send an email.
The best day — by far, according to their research — to send email was on Tuesday. The second best day was Thursday. And Wednesday was a runner up.
As for time of day, 10am came in first place (probably because this is when people settle into their work rhythm and start responding to emails), 8pm came in second place (probably because people check their email before bed), then 2pm and 6am.
All in all, these are the 12 best times to send your emails.
The best time of day to cold call
Now, cold calling. Fortunately for us, HubSpot’s award-winning blog collected research from CallHippo and reports on the results.
The best day of the week to call? Wednesday is in first place, then Thursday, then Tuesday. From Monday to Wednesday, there’s a 46% difference in response rate.
The study also mentions that the worst time of day to call is between 7am and 10am (as I mentioned earlier in the article).
As for the best time of day to call…
“The same CallHippo study actually found the best time to call a prospect is between 4:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. The second best time to pick up the phone is between 11:00 a.m and 12:00 p.m.”
Note: While these are statistically the best times to cold call and email your prospects across all industries, keep in mind that each audience is unique. If you’re cold calling a list of seniors who are likely retired, than many of these time-of-day rules might not apply (since they are largely based around the workday). Always take your audience into account.
Try it out for yourself
There you have it! According to the research, you now know the best days and time-of-days to call or email your prospects.
All you can do now is try it out for yourself. The only way to know whether or not these trends will make a difference for your own marketing efforts is to give it a go and track your results.
Conclusion
All that time you spend marketing your business…
You don’t want it to go to waste. You don’t want to spend hours emailing, texting, and cold calling prospects only to have your competitor beat you to the punch.
And that doesn’t have to be how the story ends.
Good marketing (the kind of marketing that will destroy your competition) is in the details, it’s in how you say things, the inflections in your voice, and even when you call or when you email.
Good marketing is testing, iterating, and testing again.
And I believe we’ve just given you a few new things to test.
Off ya go!