Best Time, Frequency For Sending Your Event Emails

An oldie but a goodie, email remains one of the most effective and powerful tools in your event promotion toolkit, but to optimize its effectiveness, one must plan for the best times and proper intervals at which to send said emails out.

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Guest post by Maddie Veal of Eventbrite

Email is a direct line to potential attendees, making it one of the most powerful tools in your event promotion arsenal. But when should you be sending your event marketing emails — and how often?

After all, if you send too many emails, you risk frustrating your recipients, tanking your open rates, or boosting unsubscribes. Send too few, and you risk reducing engagement with your campaigns.

In the first-ever Event Email Benchmarking Report, you’ll learn best practices for your email sends — and discover how other organizers’ emails are performing. Based on survey responses from over 340 event organizers across the U.S. and U.K., the data represents a wide range of event types and sizes.  

Here is what the report revealed about email frequency and the best day to send:

Email Frequency

If you’ve ever rolled your eyes and hit “unsubscribe” after seeing yet another email from a certain company in your inbox, then you know how frequency can affect email performance.

So how does your email frequency stack up to the competition? Check out how frequently other organizers are sending emails:

As you can see, organizers in both the U.S. and U.K. are sending less than two emails per week.

Here are a few email frequency best practices:

• Have a regular send schedule. If you send your emails at the same day and time each week, there’s less of a chance you’ll surprise recipients and spark negative reactions. Communicate your send frequency early so recipients know how often to expect emails from you.  
• Perform email frequency testing. Set up an email frequency test where you try out different frequencies (for example, weekly versus biweekly) and carefully measure your metrics. Over time, you should be able to see patterns in which frequencies are performing better.
• Offer customized email frequency. Provide an option in both your opt-in flow and unsubscribe page for readers to indicate how often they’d like to receive emails. You can also send a note to unengaged recipients asking what their preferences are — so you can adapt your frequency before they unsubscribe.

Day of the Week

If you know the best day of the week to send emails to your audience, you can dramatically improve your open rates. The day of the week that works best will likely vary a little depending on your audience. For example, if you’re organizing a professional event, your business-focused content may perform better on the weekdays. If you’re a music venue promoter sending out last-minute updates on shows, the weekend might be better.

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t learn from what other organizers are doing. So what did respondents say was the best day of the week to send event emails?

Tuesday is the most popular day for U.K. organizers to send email, while U.S. organizers prefer Wednesday sends. Nearly a fifth of organizers worldwide send email on the weekend.

With such diverse responses across the industry, how can you find out which day of the week is best for your audience?

• Try a Tuesday send. Multiple studies have shown Tuesday to be the best day to send emails. It may not be the case for your audience, but it’s a good place to start. If you send two emails a week, the same studies argue that Thursday is the best day to send your second message.
• Test, test, and test some more. Send emails at certain days and times and carefully measure your metrics to see what performs best. This is the only surefire way to know what day is best for your specific audience.

Ready to discover more about other critical email metrics — and how you can improve yours? Check out The Event Email Benchmarking Report to uncover benchmarks for everything from click-through rates to time spent on email creation.

Maddie Veal is passionate about creating content that helps event organizers solve their hairiest problems. In a past life, she worked for an experiential marketing agency where she organized launch parties and pop-up events. When she’s not typing or deleting words, Maddie is plotting her next international adventure.