Nifty News

What time should you send marketing emails on Black Friday?

  Gregg Blanchard     October 18, 2024    

Black Friday is just over a month away. It's a day when email marketers will send up to 4x their usual number of campaigns in an effort to capture some of the dollars that seem to more easily flow out of wallets and into shopping carts.

Now, the time of day to send emails is an interesting question. Some types of emails don't seem to be effected by send time as much as others. For example, Dan Oshinsky recently told a story about a brand he was working with:

I was working with a client once on their daily newsletter. They’d always had an automated, RSS-to-email strategy for their daily. They were making a big switch and moving to something written and curated by someone on their team. But as part of the switch, they were also moving from an early morning send (6am-ish) to the afternoon (1pm). Why? Because they tended to publish most of their stories mid-day, and sending at 1 p.m. would mean they’d always have a newsletter full of fresh, new stories. But there was some nervousness about the switch. Would it affect open rates at all?

So we measured it. This was in the days before Apple MPP messed with open rates — at the time, open rates were a lot more accurate. In the 30 days before the switch, the open rate on their newsletter was 32.1%. In the 30 days after, the open rate was… 32.1%. It didn’t move at all — not even a tenth of a percentage point

Open rates are one thing when it comes to a newsletter where the currency is attention. But what about when you're competing directly against very specific brands on specific days for limited dollars that can be spent? Timing may not have any impact or it could have a big impact if you send too late and those dollars are already gone.

A few weeks ago I had the chance of digging into the data during a webinar with Mike Nelson from Really Good Emails / Beefree and Val Geisler from Digioh. You should absolutely watch the recording, but if you're in this boat of competing for limited dollars, let's dig into a few numbers I shared to help you prepare for Black Friday.

What time of day do brands normally send emails?

To answer this question let's first set a bit of a baseline for context by looking first at when retail brands usually send emails. The data set we're going to use is a set of 100 top Shopify stores. These are all brands that are active, engaged email marketers and fully aware of and staffed for email marketing throughout the year.

Speaking of throughout the year, when we look at four years of email data from this group during non Black Friday times of year, here's what we see for the distribution of email volume.

normal hourly email distribution for retail brands

This curve holds pretty true across a lot of our dataset. There's very little email volume occuring before a quick rise to a peak in the morning - in this case at 10am ET - then a decline throughout the day. Another, smaller peak occurs around 8pm ET before tailing off again.

When do brands send emails on Black Friday?

Now let's look at the same data set over four years from the same brands but separate out emails that were sent on Black Friday. What does that hourly email distribution curve look like?

hourly email distribution for brands on Black friday

On Black Friday, the spike occurs at 7am ET, a full three hours before the spike on a normal day. It's like someone waves a checkered flag and suddenly every brand starts hitting "send" in their ESP.

But also notice how high the volume stays for the five hours after that spike. Instead of dropping down like we see on a normal day, email volume remains extremely high. Only around 5pm ET does it finally drop before one last, significant spike at that same 8pm ET hour we saw in the normal daily email volume graph above.

How many emails do brands send on Black Friday?

When you compare those two charts you might be asking another question: how many more emails do brands send on Black Friday relative to normal days to fill up each hour of the day with enough emails to keep volume high for so long?

Well, let's take a look. In this case, the retail brands in our sample send approximately four times as many emails on Black Friday as they do during any other day throughout the year.

This is a huge increase. Brands are sending as many emails in 1 day as they normally do in almost 4 days. Now, aggregate data is interesting, but I always believe in getting as specific as possible when looking at these sort of trends so let's do that next.

What time of day do individual brands send emails on Black Friday?

The final thing we'll look at is a visualization showing when specific brands sent email campaigns throughout black Friday. In this visualization note that:

  • Each horizontal line represents one retail brand
  • Each red dot represents an email campaign they sent on Black Friday
  • The middle represents the noon hour on Black Friday
  • The far left is midnight to begin Black Friday
  • The far right is the 11pm ET hour to end Black Friday

Okay, let's see how these individual brands are spreading out their email campaigns throughout Black Friday.

chart showing hourly email distribution

The reason I love to dig in to this level is because you can see that the aggregate is made up of lots of different behaviors from the individual brands. In other words, the answer to the question of when you should send your email campaigns on Black Friday is a clear, classic:

it depends.

For example, let's explore three types of strategy brands appear to be deploying with their timing and frequency of emails on Black Friday.

1) Hit the Spikes

The first group appears to try to hit the two spikes. They see those times as the most likely folks will be in their inbox and they're trying to ride that wave as much as they can.

2) Spike + Trough

The next group appears to hit the spike for the reasons mentioned above, but they also want to try to reach folks when there's a little bit less competition so they follow up on that first email during a time that's a little bit slower.

3) Custom

Finally, there are brands that are using a totally different and unique strategy. They'll send super early and then a trough or only hit troughs, or just send one email (not picture, the chart was just showing brands sending multiple emails) at the spike and call it good.

The best answer?

When I wrote about email timing a few months ago I said this at the end:

In other words, the best time to send email is going to be different for everyone. If your competitors send their marketing emails at 10am MT, you may want to shoot for 9:30am MT. If your competitors send early in the morning, you may want to wait and send 30 minutes later to see if you can be higher in the inbox than them. But you can't identify any of these email send time opportunities by looking at a generic, aggregated data set. You can only see these my looking at the average send times of your specific competitors.

I still think that's a fair answer. Not a perfect answer or the best answer, just one that balances the data with most opportunities.

But it comes with an important caveat: If you weren't tracking your competitors' emails during Black Friday last year, it may be too late to get those answers. Luckily, there's still time to subscribe to their emails now ahead of Black Friday and get that data you need so you're ready for next year and every normal day until then. Whether you use SendView to track or try to do it on your own, now is the time to get something in place.