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As the pandemic shaped business communications, email has emerged as the #1 marketing channel for ROI. Consider that email marketing generates $42 for every $1 spent and that 78% of marketers in 2020 said email is essential to company growth, compared to 71% in 2019.
As more and more marketers get on board with email, you are competing with many other companies for your recipient’s attention. That means timing is of the essence: not only when to send that email—but perhaps even more relevant, when not to send that email. You don’t want to pour everything you’ve got into a perfect email only to have your message ignored.
Related: 101 Email Marketing Statistics Every Marketer Should Know in 2022
There’s no shortage of advice on the best days and times to send a B2B email in general, but what about emailing to manufacturers, specifically? After all, there are going to be notable differences across industries in the way executives handle email.
That’s where MNI’s data comes in.
At MNI, we email manufacturers a lot. Among the many ways we update the information that populates our detailed business profiles of the nation’s manufacturers is by sending out email questionnaires to the nearly 460,000 industrial companies in our database.
In the process of improving our own rate of contact with manufacturers, we collected some data on what days of the week and times of day were best for emailing manufacturers. The results were surprising. And we thought: our customers might find this useful too!
Based on the performance of hundreds of thousands of emails we’ve sent, manufacturers on average open our emails 10.5% of the time, and of that 10.5%, an average of 24% click through. Comparing general email marketing benchmarks, Campaign Monitor reports the average open rate across all industries is 21.5% while the click-to-open rate is 10.5% (click-to-open refers to the percentage of those who opened the email who also clicked on a link).
This suggests that while it may be a challenge to get the attention of your prospects in manufacturing, once you do, they are more likely to interact with your content.
So how can you improve the chances of your prospects in manufacturing opening your email? Starting with a great subject line helps, of course, and you can get our tips for crafting the best B2B email subject line here. But knowing the best times and time of day to send that email helps too.
Based on our analysis, emails sent to manufacturers on Tuesdays or Wednesdays fared the best. Tuesday emails resulted in a 11.4% open rate, and of that 11.4%, 25.7% clicked through to our questionnaires. Wednesday email resulted in a 11.3% open rate, with a 26.3% click-to-open rate. Thursday’s open rate was a fraction above Wednesday’s at 11.35%, but its 24.6% click-to-open rate was notably lower.
The worst days to email manufacturers? Stay away from Mondays and Fridays, says our data. Especially Fridays, which has a lower open rate than Monday (8.8% versus 9.3% on Monday) and the lowest click-to-open rate of the week at 20.1% (Monday’s, by comparison, is 21.6%).
So now you know which days of the week are best to email manufacturers, but what time of day is best?
Probably not what you think.
When it comes to emailing manufacturers, it turns out that the early bird does not get the worm. Emails sent in the early morning hours fared notably worse than those sent in the afternoon and mid-morning. The highest open rate occurred between 3pm and 4pm, while the highest click-to-open rate occurred between 2pm and 3pm as well as 11am and12pm.
Those received between 2pm and 3pm (based on the recipient’s time zone) scored an open rate of 11.4% and a click-to-open rate of 27.2%, while recipients opened those sent between 3pm and 4pm at a rate of 13.05%, and of those openers, 26.8% clicked through. Click-to-open rates declined after that, with the 4pm-5pm open rate coming in at 12.2% with a click-to-open rate of 23%.
Of the morning hours, emails sent mid-morning (between 11am and noon) fared the best, garnering a 11.8% open rate and a 27.2% click-to-open rate.
Avoid the morning hours, especially early morning hours. Emails sent between 8am and 9am scored the worst, with a 5.01% open rate and 10.3% click-to-open rate. Open rates then improved significantly between 9am and 11am, hovering around 9.5%.
In conclusion, Tuesdays and Wednesdays between 2pm and 4pm are generally the best days times to email manufacturers based on data we’ve collected from the hundreds of thousands of emails we’ve sent.
Now that you’ve nailed down the best time to send your email, make sure you’ve got the best targets. With nearly a half million industrial business profiles, including direct executives email addresses, IndustrySelect can help you target the right recipients for your next email marketing campaign. See a sample profile or get started now with a free demo!
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