A common concern for email marketers is when to send email. You want your recipients to notice your email when it comes in, and you want their attention focused on engaging with the email.

You don’t want to compete with 20 other messages when a recipient first opens the inbox. But when is the best time to send? The quick answer is that “it depends.” ReachMail did some research and selected aggregate numbers of emails from both b2b and consumer marketersWe picked Wednesday for a weekday and Saturday for a weekend day. The difference are striking. Click here for the results. Key takeaways:

>> Marketing emails are not “opened first thing.” In fact, marketing email peaks at around noon on Wednesday and gradually declines until 5 PM before steeply declining. We theorize that recipients primarily focus on work-related email from colleagues, clients and supervisors in the morning. Once they’ve taken care of that, they’re more open to opening and engaging your email.
* Recommendation – send email between 12-1 PM for maximum engagement
>> Email is opened earlier on the weekends. Recipients are open to engaging with marketing email all day. Starting at 9 AM and gradually peaking at noon, then dropping slightly with a sharp spike at 5 PM – recipients are steadily engaged.
* Recommendation – email between 10-11 AM, consider testing at 3 PM