Timing is everything when it comes to your email communications. If your message arrives in a member’s inbox alongside dozens of other newsletters, memos, and emails from colleagues, it might easily be ignored. The good news is that associations can use practical strategies to determine the best times and days to send emails for maximum response.

Plenty of books, websites, and marketing consultants offer credible ideas about email campaign timing and optimization. But their recommendations are usually based on corporate and general consumer data. Associations have a narrower, more specific audience, and what works with them may vary significantly from best practice for businesses. What’s more, ideal emailing practices can differ from association to association. The work schedule and office time of a construction manager can be very different from that of a pediatric medicine specialist or a teacher. Your members’ responsiveness to professional emails will reflect these differences.

How to Measure 

Most email and web analytics platforms have all the tools necessary to determine prime email timing through an examination of delivery, open, and click-through rates. Talk to your provider for help on how to access that data, if you’re not already familiar with the tools.

Once you have access to the metrics tools, it’s time to start testing. Actively experiment with sending emails at different times of the day and on different days of the week, even if some of these seem counterintuitive. Record the results on a spreadsheet like the one below. Record-keeping is important, since it gives you a high-level view of how your outreach is performing. It will be difficult to spot problems if you don’t track results.

Campaign	Day of Week	Time Sent	Sent	Delivered	Opened	Link Clicked	Purchased
Annual Conference	Tuesday	Morning	10,000	950	600	200	20
Annual Conference	Tuesday	Evening	10,000	950	200	20	2
Annual Conference	Thursday	Morning	10,000	950	500	250	25
Annual Conference	Thursday	Evening	10,000	950	150	15	1
Annual Conference	Friday	Morning	10,000	950	400	200	20
Annual Conference	Friday	Evening	10,000	950	50	5	0

Over several months, you’ll see patterns emerge that are specific to your market. You can use these to guide your email communication plan. In the example above, no one is opening their emails in the evening. Mornings seem to be most successful.

You don’t need to constantly test. Once you have identified a pattern, it tends to be stable and predictable over many years. A re-validation every few years is enough.

What to Test

To determine the most effective tactics for reaching your audience by email, test several key variables.  

Time of day. This is the most important factor, and it’s the easiest to get wrong if you rely on intuition, your own email-reading habits, or outside advice. The example above monitored open rates for morning and evening, but you can hone your analysis to examine more specific points throughout the day.

Record-keeping is important, since it gives you a high-level view of how your outreach is performing. It will be difficult to spot problems if you don’t track results.

Day of the week. The next most important measurement is the day of the week the email goes out. As with timing, this varies greatly by industry. If your emails have better measurements on Tuesdays and Fridays, plan your communications strategy around that. If the best days are  inconvenient for your staff, you can schedule emails in advance. Almost all of the tools on the market allow you to plan and finalize a campaign several days beforehand and will send your email automatically on the date and time you choose.

Don’t exclude weekends and holidays in your tests. Some audiences respond surprisingly well to emails on non-workdays, when they may be catching up on professional development opportunities or the unread emails that have accumulated the week before. 

Volume and frequency. No one likes having too many emails piling up in their inbox, and some audiences respond strongly to aggressive outreach from the same association in the same week by ignoring or deleting them. If you send five emails every week, it’s likely you’ll see a marked decrease in member engagement after the third, fourth, and fifth message.

Worse, your recipients may unsubscribe from your list to reduce inbox clutter. The U.S., Canada, and European Union countries have strict laws respecting when a contact has made a permanent removal request. An annoyed member (or prospect) is one that you may never be able to reach again. The EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation, which was adopted in 2016 and will be fully enforced beginning in May 2018, imposes even stricter requirements.

Look at past frequency data if you have any. In the weeks that you sent three or more emails, did engagement decrease significantly compared to the weeks when you sent one or two? Space out your messages accordingly.

There is often significant pressure within an association to send more emails. All of your programs are important, and all of them deserve publicity. Analyzing your past performance data will allow you to justify to colleagues why a limited number of emails per week yields the best outcomes.

Measuring, testing, and adjusting the timing of your email campaigns are crucial to making sure that you’re offering the most value to your members. If you take the time to test your strategy and adjust it based on the data you receive, you will be able to give your members the information they need when they are likely to see it through the cloud of other distractions and professional priorities.