By Maverick Steffen | Daily Marketing Advice

Overall, you want to send your email at the best possible time, to give your email the best possible opportunity to be read and absorbed by as many people as possible on your list.

There is nothing artful about discovering the best time to send your campaigns. In fact, steps can easily be taken to maximize your open rate, your recipient's attention span and the amount of time they have to read your email.

For example, when I began researching the best time to send my weekly newsletter, I had a lot of theories.

Because I was sending email to people that typically worked 9-5, I thought first thing in the morning might work well. But which day?

So, what I did was take my list, and break it up into 7 lists to cover each day of the week. This was a week with no holidays or anything significant (such as distracting news or political nonsense).

I then took each of those 7 lists, and broke them up in half, so now I have 14 total lists.

I then scheduled the same email to go to 7 lists to go out at 7 am on that list's particular day, and the other to go out at 2 pm on that list's particular day.

The results were pretty dramatic.

The open rate for my Monday morning list had a 15% higher open rate than any other list!

This was, great, but I wasn't finished yet.

Next, I set the list with the lowest open rate to go out on Monday morning, and set all the other lists to go out at different times, including placing the list with the highest open rate to go out during the time of the lowest open rate, Saturday afternoon.

Guess what: Monday morning continued to have the highest open rate.

However, I wasn't done yet!

Next I broke up the lists in 4, and sent the same email to them at 3 am, 6 am, 9 am and 12 pm on Monday. The list that performed the best was the Monday at 3 am. Also, the total open rate (the amount of times people opened the email multiple times) was also the highest on Monday morning at 3 am.

Now I had the best possible time to send my weekly newsletter, and even a new name for it: Matt's Monday Morning Marketing Memo.

The bottom line is you have a list, and that list should probably be made up of people with pretty similar schedules (in general).

As a result, the best course of action is to keep experimenting until you discover the best time to email them, whether it be to send them advice, or a newer product proportion.