For a long time, I used to send out my content in the morning. Makes sense, right? People start their day, check their emails, and come across it.
Except that my data says otherwise.
The traffic timeline
In Webful, there’s a traffic timeline. It shows exactly when your visitors are most active, hour by hour, day by day.
On my site, the peak activity is on Wednesdays at 6 p.m. 57 visits during that time slot alone. Not in the morning. Not on Monday. Wednesday evening.
And that completely changes my outreach strategy.
General studies don’t apply to you
Sending an email at the right time isn’t a matter of gut feeling or what studies say about “the best time to email.” It’s a matter of knowing when your specific audience is available and active.
A study that says “send on Tuesday morning” is referring to an overall average calculated across thousands of companies, industries, and different types of users. Not your specific users.
For a SaaS company, timing becomes critical
Follow-up after inactivity, notification of a new feature, onboarding email on Day 3: if you send them when your user is in a meeting or asleep, they might see them. But they won’t read them.
If you send them when they’re at their screen and available, you increase your chances that they’ll take action. The same email sequence, sent at the right time, can have a very different open rate—without changing a single line of content.
So before following general advice on when to send emails, check when your own visitors are active. The answer is in your data.
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