Our mates at Soundest ecommerce email marketing recently published a survey based on 15,000 active online stores and their customers’ behaviour. Let’s see what they discovered.

To start with, the following data concerns ecommerce email campaigns sent by small and medium-sized businesses. It has nothing to do with newsletters sent by lifestyle blogs, non-governmental organizations or city cultural events (unless they sell tickets). So do not be surprised about different results found elsewhere on the Internet.

A General View vs. Certain Countries

Taking into account all 130 countries that Soundest have clients in, promotional newsletters convert best on weekends, though Wednesdays has the best “Opens”. Why is this so? I believe that this is because on weekends it is more difficult to reach customers via email, but those that you do reach have time to explore your online store and add products to their shopping carts.

Though the survey data was collected in many countries, the absolute majority (63%) of Soundest clients are based in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and India. So the insights about these countries are most representative. A piece of ecommerce email marketing infographic below shows the average conversion rate and average order value in each country.

Check out the entire ecommerce email marketing infographic here and learn which month of the year is best for email marketing.

The Best Day for Emails differs for each Country

The numbers above are not distributed among weekdays equally. Digging deeper into the data, we can say the following:

1. Customers from different countries react to promotional emails differently. This is why it is not very accurate to determine the best weekday for all word countries on which to send email campaigns.

As you can see, the best days for email opens in countries are so different that it is even hard to say whether the beginning of the week or the weekend is better.

2. As I have already mentioned, the best day for open rates does not necessarily correlate with the best conversion rate or the biggest order value. The chart below represents the average email conversion rate over the entire week.

These two charts illustrate customer engagement with promotional emails. They indicate the following:

• For the United States, Wednesday is the best day on which to send promotional newsletters. On this day open and conversion rates are at their highest.
• In Canada, though the open rate is the greatest during the middle of the week, the conversion rate is much better on Sundays.
• For Australia, I would say Tuesday is the day.
• For the United Kingdom the graphs correlate and indicate that Thursday is the best day to send emails.
• For India, Wednesday and Sunday are equally good.

The Bottom Line

These charts demonstrate general tendencies in small and medium-sized ecommerce companies. If your newsletters perform stunningly well on the “bad days” according to the charts, that is totally fine - all of us target different audiences with stronger or weaker engagement. However, you could try different days for the sake of curiosity! The most important thing is to be consistent in your email strategy and carry on creating value for your customers.

Check out more results of Soundest ecommerce email marketing research 2016.