Marketing Emails Sent at 4 p.m. have the Highest Open Rate



2017 Email Marketing Benchmarks

Planning to send your next marketing email? Consider sending it at 4 p.m. Turns out it’s the best time to get a response from your target audience.

This interesting insight comes from a new study by email marketing software provider, GetResponse.




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Email Marketing Benchmarks

The report found emails sent at 4 p.m. receive the highest open (25.13 percent) and click-through (3.82 percent) rates compared to other times.

Vimeo Has an Edge Over YouTube

Many marketers embed videos in their emails to engage their audience. But which hosting platform should you choose when you want to add a video in your email? Turns out, it’s not YouTube but Vimeo that delivers better results.

According to the report, emails with Vimeo videos have a higher open rate (47.35 percent) and click-through rate (12.50 percent) than emails with YouTube videos (with an open rate of 31.90 percent and a click through rate of 5.56 percent by comparison).

Sharper Subject Lines Yield Desired Results

Compelling subject lines that convey your message in 210 to 219 characters are most likely to be opened by your readers. And to pique your customers’ attention, the subject line must provide a glimpse of what’s inside the email.



Irek Klimczak, Content Marketing Expert at GetResponse explains, “If the content is relevant to your audience, it’s easy to come up with a subject line that results in a high open rate.”

Another tip is to personalize your subject lines and use emojis found to return higher open rates.

Building Relations is Key to Email Marketing Success

It’s interesting to note marketers with smaller lists were found to be better at engaging their audience. What’s more, their messages got higher open and click-through rates.

The message is clear: when growing your list, don’t lose touch with your existing customers. Nurture your relationship and you will get better results.



For the report, GetResponse analyzed almost 2 billion emails sent by its customers from March to May 2017, in 126 countries across 19 industries.

Image: GetResponse


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Shubhomita Bose Shubhomita Bose is a Staff Writer for Small Business Trends. She covers key studies and surveys about the small business market, along with general small business news. She draws on 8 years of experience in copywriting, marketing and communications, having worked extensively on creating content for small and medium sized enterprises.

10 Reactions
  1. Nice article you shared. Here good explanation for e mail open rate that helps people. Also give some points in detail that helpful for people. I like this post and helpful for me for understand this . Keep its up good things you shared.

  2. I think it is interesting that at 4pm is the best time to send a marketing email. I’m assuming most get out of work, and immediately look through their emails? This was a great post where I learned some new stats. Thanks for this article!

  3. Hi, Just wondering, how does using Vimeo videos trigger high open rates? It doesn’t make sense to me as people cannot figure out that you have sent them Vimeo video in email so they can open them. Get it?
    The opens can be triggered by Subject Line saying Vimeo or from address or name. May be the list was segmented based on who views the vimeo and Subjecline personalised based on that.

    Please explain how did it worked?

  4. I’d be interested to follow the open rate and click through rate all the way to conversion rate or engagement statistics. Personally, I open those 4pm emails to quickly file them away and clean up my inbox.

  5. I agree with Robert. I have opened emails at that time, but I’m just breezing through them. I would be interested to see the conversion rate as well.

  6. I am not sure if there’s a trick to it as we know that we have to do the testing first before concluding the high open rate. But good point and I will surely give it a shot and see if there’s changes to my conversion.

  7. You all know this isn’t the first place that wrote about the 4pm open rate!

    While some people will find this works great, remember where your email are going and to what type of audience.

    I personally think 10am is better because most people wake up and just purge their emails because it’s not happening at the time they do business. Just a thought.

  8. It depend on what niche you are, for example if your audience are working or the type who shop online. Every niche has different character as to how and when they open an email, so it is better to test and keep on testing. That’s why email marketing tool has the A|B testing like mailchimp, activetrail and etc…





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