What Is the Best Time to Send Marketing Emails for Ecommerce?

There's no universal best time to send marketing emails. The best time is whenever your subscribers are most likely to buy, and you find it by testing. Send the same type of campaign at different times and days, repeat each test 5 to 8 times, and pick the winner by placed order rate and revenue, not opens.

Search for it and you'll get an answer straight away.

Tuesday at 10 a.m. Thursday at 8 p.m. Saturday morning. It depends on whose study you read.

Your subscribers haven't read those studies.

Some of them shop on a Tuesday morning before work. Others scroll on a Thursday evening on the couch. Which group buys more from you is something only your own data can tell you.

By Emiel Dingemans, Founder of Magicianly

Updated October 2026

Is There a Best Time to Send Marketing Emails?

Not a universal one. Every list has its own habits, and the best time for a brand selling to busy parents won't be the best time for a brand selling cycling gear.

General "best time" studies average results across thousands of senders, industries and audiences. Treat them as a guess to test, at most. They can't tell you when your customers buy.

And most of them rank send times by opens, which is the wrong scoreboard.

Why Shouldn't You Pick a Send Time Based on Open Rate?

Because the time that gets the most opens isn't always the time that gets the most orders.

Say you test 7 a.m. against 2 p.m. The morning send gets the higher open rate. The afternoon send brings in more revenue. Which one do you want?

It works the same way with evenings. People might open a bit less, but they're at home and settled, so they're more likely to buy when they do.

Open rates are also less reliable than they look, because Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates them. We explain that in are your Klaviyo open rates real?

So we judge every send-time test on placed order rate and revenue. Opens and clicks are useful context. They don't pick the winner.

How Do You Test the Best Send Time for Your List?

Run a clean 50/50 split where the only difference is the send time, then repeat it across several campaigns. Here's how we set it up in Klaviyo:

1. 1Pick two clearly different times. Morning against evening, not 9:00 against 9:30. If you don't know where to start, Klaviyo itself suggests trying an evening time.
2. 2Change nothing else. Same email, same subject line, same audience. Klaviyo's A/B testing guide says the same: keep content and subject lines exactly the same when you test send times.
3. 3Split the whole audience 50/50. Set the test size to 100%, so half your engaged segment gets time A and the other half gets time B.
4. 4Use placed order rate as the winning metric. Klaviyo itself lists send time and day of week among the tests to run for placed order rate.
5. 5Send in each recipient's local time zone if your customers are spread across time zones. According to Klaviyo's guide to campaign send options, that option only shows up for A/B tests with a 50/50 split.
6. 6Wait for the orders. People take longer to buy than to open. Give it a couple of days before you compare.
7. 7Write it down. Log the two times, the campaign type, placed order rate and revenue for each half. One result is a data point. Five to eight are a pattern.

Then test day of week the same way. One thing at a time: time of day or day of week, never both in the same test.

Why Not Let Klaviyo Pick the Winner Automatically?

Because for send-time tests, the automatic option works against you.

A standard Klaviyo A/B test sends each version to a test group (Klaviyo's example uses 20% each), waits a few hours, then sends the winner to everyone else. That causes two problems:

• the biggest part of your list gets the email hours after either time you were testing;
• a few hours is too short to judge orders. Opens come in fast. Purchases don't.

So we always use a manual 50/50 split and look at the result ourselves after a couple of days. More on how we run tests in our guide to email A/B testing.

How Many Times Should You Repeat a Send-Time Test?

At least 5 to 8 times before you draw a conclusion. One send is too easily skewed by other things.

A strong product, a payday, a heatwave, a competitor's sale, a launch that happened to land on one side of the test. Any of those can make a time slot look better for reasons that have nothing to do with the clock.

Keep the comparison fair by testing within the same type of campaign. Compare a product-focused email with another product-focused email, not a bestseller roundup with a founder story.

If there's still no consistent pattern after eight sends, the difference is probably small for your list. Pick the time that's easiest to plan around and spend your testing energy on angles and content instead.

Should You Use Klaviyo Smart Send Time?

If your campaigns go to 12,000 or more recipients, it's worth a look as a starting point. Just keep in mind what it optimizes for.

Here's how Klaviyo's Smart Send Time works:

• its tests only run on email campaigns with at least 12,000 recipients;
• in the exploratory phase, Klaviyo sends a campaign over 24 hours, with each recipient randomly assigned an hour in their local time;
• smaller audiences need more exploratory sends, from 4 to 5 for 12,000 to 17,999 recipients to fewer as the audience grows;
• a focused send then checks the best time against 2 hours before and 2 hours after;
• after that, you can send at the optimal time in each recipient's local time zone.

Klaviyo describes it as a way to maximize open and click rates. Useful, but that's not the same as orders. So we treat the Smart Send Time result as a strong hypothesis, then check it with a manual 50/50 test on placed order rate.

Klaviyo also says to keep time-sensitive content, like flash sales, and major holidays out of these tests. Good advice, and it applies to manual tests too.

What About Klaviyo Personalized Send Time?

Personalized Send Time picks a send time for each recipient within a window you set, instead of one time for everyone. It's only available with Klaviyo's Marketing Analytics or Advanced KDP packages.

From Klaviyo's guide to Personalized Send Time:

• it works for email, SMS, push and WhatsApp campaigns, not flows;
• you have to schedule at least one day ahead;
• it learns from opens, clicks and placed orders across your campaigns;
• Klaviyo holds back a random control group and reports the lift against it.

That control group is the part we like. If you use it, judge it by the lift in placed orders, not the lift in opens. And keep it away from flash sales and anything with a hard deadline, where everyone needs the message at the same moment.

Manual Tests vs Smart Send Time vs Personalized Send Time

Does Send Time Matter for Flows?

Less than you'd think. Flows start when someone does something, so the delay after that trigger matters far more than the clock.

That's where we test timing in flows, starting with the first email, because it usually has the biggest impact. The ranges we typically test for the first email:

• site abandonment: 1 to 4 hours after the visit;
• browse abandonment: 30 minutes to 2 hours;
• cart and checkout abandonment: 15 minutes to 1 hour.

The further down the funnel, the shorter the delay. We go deeper on the first of those in our Klaviyo site abandonment flow guide, and on the cart side in abandoned cart email timing.

What About Sales Events Like Black Friday?

During a big sales event, timing is about a rhythm across the day, not one perfect slot.

On the peak days of Black Friday weekend, we use a three-send day: a designed email in the morning, a short plain-text email in the afternoon and a resend of the afternoon email in the evening with a new subject line and preview text. The full plan is in Black Friday email marketing.

Just don't run send-time tests during those weeks. People behave differently, so whatever you learn won't hold in a normal month.

Is Send Time Really Your Problem?

Often it isn't. A lot of brands start testing send times when their results dip, and the needle barely moves.

That's because the bigger levers sit elsewhere: who you send to, what you send and how often. If your list has learned that every email is a discount, no send time fixes that. Start with an engaged segment, a real mix of campaign types and a sensible rhythm, which we cover in how often to send marketing emails.

A weak email at the perfect time is still a weak email.

What Are the Most Common Send-Time Mistakes?

Most of them come from treating send time as a fact you can look up instead of something you test.

1. 1Copying a "best time" from a study instead of testing your own list.
2. 2Picking the winner on open rate.
3. 3Calling a winner after one send.
4. 4Letting the platform send the winner to the rest of the list a few hours later.
5. 5Running send-time tests on flash sales, holidays or launches.
6. 6Changing the send time and the content in the same test.
7. 7Ignoring time zones when your customers are spread out.

So What Is the Best Time to Send Marketing Emails?

The one your own customers buy at.

Pick two clearly different times, split your engaged audience 50/50, change nothing else, repeat it 5 to 8 times and pick the winner by placed order rate and revenue. Then test day of week the same way.

If your list is big enough, Klaviyo's send-time tools can give you a head start. Just check their answer against orders.

The clock matters a little.

What you send matters a lot more.