The best times to send a marketing email are around 10am, shortly after people arrive at work and have their morning coffee, and 1pm, when people are catching up on emails after lunch.

That’s according to the latest quarterly report from GetResponse, which analyzed around 4 billion emails sent by its customers from January to June 2019, in 126 countries across 19 industries.

Similar to its previous reports, it has seen an increase in click-through rates later in the afternoon, around 6 PM when many people return home.

Other key findings include:

• It’s become very clear that consumers in various locations show different levels of engagement when interacting with email marketing campaigns. Take Europe and North America for example. The difference in their average email open rate is 7.84 percentage points (26.84% vs 19%). For click-throughs it’s 1.37 percentage points (4.35% vs 2.98%). This may not seem like much at first, but given the fact that the average click-through rate (CTR) in North America is 2.98%, the difference of 1.37 percentage points accounts for +46% more clicks (if we ignore the sample size difference) for the campaigns sent by European marketers.
• GDPR appears to have had minimal impact a year on. The strongest markets like Germany, France, or the Netherlands, still dominate the top of its table for CTR. Although France saw a loss of 1 percentage point in CTR, Germany observed an over 1.7 percentage point increase around the same time. Countries that were primarily unaffected by GDPR, e.g., Brazil, the US, and Canada, saw their average open rates and click-through rates drop (continuing the decline from last year.). GetResponse believes that’s because other regulations like the CCPA are making global consumers more aware of their rights – and why and how to unsubscribe.
• In terms of industry engagement trends, restaurants and food, non-profits, and publishers are still on top. This suggests brands that send content about things we like and care about will always get the highest engagement. At the same time, legal services, agencies, and healthcare have seen a drop. This could be because of their campaigns – or the nature of the industry.
• Want high open and click through rates? Send automated emails triggered by subscriber behaviour. GetResponse says it’s even worth doing for simple messages like RSS emails sent when you publish a new blog post. Newsletters and one-off emails still work. But triggered emails bring the best results.
• When it comes to content, emails with video still generate the highest engagement rates. The problem is not all email clients support it, which is why only around 8% of the emails our customers send contain links to videos. For now, GetResponse says the best workaround is to use an image (maybe even a GIF) that looks like a video player and links to your page.

To read the full GetResponse Report, click here.