The best time to send prospecting emails to tech companies
The best time to send prospecting emails to tech companies
At Sopro, there’s almost nothing we love more than data. To be fair, we do really like ice cream. And puppies. But data gets to the core of our expertise, so when it comes to revealing the best time to send prospecting emails to Tech companies, we decided to dive right into the mountain of evidence we’ve been collecting.
Our real-life dataset covers the last six months, examining over 2.5 million prospecting emails sent to over 70 industries.
What it demonstrates is that one size definitely doesn’t fit all. In fact, looking across all industries at the lowest and highest timeslots for open rates, the best time slot was 1,737% more effective than the worst!
As 79% of B2B marketers cite email as the most effective demand generation distribution channel, even small improvements to any stage of the process will lead to increased ROI. That’s what this tool is for: giving you one of the marginal gains that add up to big wins.
The challenges of prospecting to tech brands
Demand generation is a challenge for every business, but each industry has its unique problems.
Prospecting to the IT industry can be trickier than many others. The cost, effort and logistics of changing embedded tech is a huge barrier, and many brands will be resistant to change.
Lumping a huge variety of businesses into ‘the IT industry’ hides how much variety there is in the sector. One of the first issues you face is targeting. How do you find the right people, at the right companies, in a sea of tech brands? Our answer is a sea of clever people who are highly skilled at segmenting data.
And once you’ve found the right people, you have to outshine the competition. IT is a highly targeted sector, so to have the highest chance of success you need to tweak every lever you can.
The timing of when you send your emails is one such lever, so let’s dive into the data and find out when to send.
The data: Best time to send based on open rates
Let’s dive straight into the extremes. The lowest open rate (23.4%) comes between 4 – 5 pm on a Thursday. The highest rate (34.5%) is seen during Wednesday’s lunch hour: 1 – 2 pm. This means that sending an email at the right time can result in a 47% increase in the rate your prospecting emails are opened!
The Wednesday lunch hour, the hump hour of the hump day, is a popular slot. Across all 70 industries in our study, this slot is the best time to send a prospecting email for great open rates.
Email open rates to IT companies tend to follow the same pattern over the course of a day, regardless of which day of the week it is.
There is an early morning peak, as tech workers settle into their beanbag with a morning cappuccino and begin the day by clearing out their inbox. After 10 am, there is a steady decline as meetings, calls and proper work get underway and the inbox is ignored.
The peak comes at the traditional lunch hour of 1 – 2 pm, implying that tech execs tend to grab a quick Pret and return to their desk instead of hitting the breakout room.
The afternoon then follows a similar pattern, with open rates declining further than at any other point in the day (there are games of table tennis to be played, after all).
Interestingly, open rates then pick up beyond the traditional clocking off time of 5 pm. This might suggest that the hard-working, high-flying, and harder to reach professionals are easiest to reach when the office hubbub dies down.
The data: Best time to send based on response rates
The lowest response rate is just 4.4%, on Friday from 2 – 3 pm. While average open rates for this period sit at a respectable 31% across the week, the emails don’t get much of a response on a Friday.
The lowest response rate on average is 5 – 6 pm. One possible reason behind this is commuting workers: quickly checking an incoming email on their phone before returning to the more pressing job of throwing a banana in Mario Kart Tour.
The highest rate comes on Monday between 1 – 2 pm. At 12.4% it is an increase of 182% on the lowest response rate for tech brands.
Monday and Tuesday’s response rates follow a similar pattern to the open rates, with a peak in the morning and at lunchtime.
By Wednesday a new shape has emerged. Gone are the lunchtime peaks, and the early morning spikes are less pronounced.
On all three days, 10-11 am is the most successful slot for getting a response to your prospecting email, but from there the graphs start to resemble my bank balance creeping towards the end of the month: an alarming and seemingly never-ending decline.
The data: Best time to send based on lead rates
The lead rates of prospecting emails sent to the tech industry show the biggest variance in terms of success; from just 0.77% (Wednesday 2 – 3 pm) up to an amazing 5.4% (Tuesday , 10 – 11 am). This translates to a 601% increase in the number of leads that could be generated.
Again, there is a consistent pattern to the changing lead rates throughout the day. While 2 – 4 pm is generally (but not always) the least favourable time to send an email, the best time to send is surprisingly consistent.
Every day, the 10 am slot posts the highest lead rates for that day. Neatly demonstrating the value in looking at lead rates by industry, both of these time slots are not particularly fruitful across all industries.
We can speculate around the reasons behind it. But the data shows us that when it comes to IT services, these are the times you are most likely to get a lead from your prospecting email.
Example email template for prospecting to tech companies
As we have seen, timings are important. But with any communication, content is king. If you don’t nail the introductory mail and follow-ups right by following the golden rules of prospecting, it won’t matter what time you send your message.
Below is an example of a high performing, initial outreach email template from our archives, sent on behalf of a client targeting brands in the IT industry.
Subject: *|COMPANY|* – Your Amazon-like customer journey
*|UK_MORNING_OR_AFTERNOON_GREETING|* *|FIRSTNAME|*,
Just a quick intro as I wanted the opportunity to introduce MyBrand to *|COMPANY|*.
After over 13 years of working as a *|INFORMALCOMPANYINDUSTRY|* provider, it still frustrates me that as an industry we continue to drive our prospective customers through poor online buying journeys.
What is the first thing we tend to ask an existing customer when they look to purchase an additional product: Name? Address? Date of Birth?
I appreciate I’m biased, but I believe our business has built the alternative; a solution that offers firms in the *|INFORMALCOMPANYINDUSTRY|* space an Amazon-like interaction for their customers by using modern technology, either integrating with existing back-office solutions or built/rebuilt by ourselves using modern architecture.
This means we can deliver flexible front end solutions in multiple brands with text, imagery, and workflows that match your array of customers giving them an individual, hyper-personalised buying experience.
I’d love to show you how we’ve combined our expert knowledge of the *|INFORMALCOMPANYINDUSTRY|* industry with the latest tech and how it would work for *|COMPANY|*. Would you be available either *|WEEKDAY_PLUS_2|* or *|WEEKDAY_PLUS_3|* for a quick screen share?
Kind regards,
Optimising the time slot you send your tech prospecting emails can improve your open rates by 47%, your response rates by 182%, and your lead rates by 601%.
