Ignore email marketing research. A great deal of money and time is invested in them and the conclusions can be extremely useful but whatever you do, don't base your next campaign on them.

All research is historical. It is a record of what used to happen. Further, once the conclusions become general knowledge in the small world in email marketing, companies take them into account, and so circumstances change. So what to trust when considering the timing of your next email marketing campaign? Let us examine the evidence.

It wasn't so long ago that it was accepted wisdom not to send B2B emails of a weekend as people were not at work, nor on Friday as that is the day for finishing off, often at a panic, and on Monday the week ahead was planned.

Later research showed that recipients were becoming less enamoured with their inboxes being filled on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays and the new suggestion was that Fridays are not so bad after all and weekends (as we all know) are not entirely given to relaxing and trying to light the barbecue.

There is one inescapable conclusion that can be drawn from the various research results, and that is that the best time to send a marketing email is a moving target. If you want to hit it then it is up to you to discover where it is. Thankfully, there are simple methods to do so.

Without waiting for your open rate to show a drop, split your email marketing list, giving a statistically significant number without risking too many. We will cover this in a future article, but run with 10% for now.

The trick is to find a reason to pick a different time or day. Are people in the relevant position happy to chat when phoned at 3pm on a Friday? If so then that is the time to try. Or are you very busy on a Thursday morning, always trying to answer two phones at once? Then move away from that.

Your email marketing software returns are there for your own personal research. Believe them and do not tell others your conclusions.