When to send your hospitality marketing emails

Three email timing questions answered, and why your own open rates beat any industry average.

When we welcome new customers to Stampede and show them the marketing feature, three questions come up almost every time. They are all about timing: the best hour of the day to send, the best day of the week, and how often to email at all. So we gathered them together and grilled our own marketing team for the answers.

The short version of all three: your own data beats any industry average. Here is the long version.

1. When is the best time to send an email campaign?

Timing has a big impact on whether a campaign gets read. But there is no one size fits all hour. It is specific to your industry, your business and your customers, and the only reliable way to find yours is to look at the numbers you already have.

Start with your historic campaigns. Your open rates by send time tell you when your audience actually reads, which is worth more than any benchmark study. Your social media stats give the same hint from the other side: when your followers are online and engaging is roughly when they will also check their inbox.

Then think about the day your guests actually live. Most people glance at their phone before work, over lunch and again in the evening. Families and office workers live different days, so the right hour follows your customer demographic rather than a chart.

The content matters as well. A longer monthly newsletter suits an evening or weekend read. A short, punchy lunch offer should land just before people start deciding where to eat.

2. Which day is the best to send emails?

Weekdays generally outperform weekends for marketing email, but relevance to your own calendar matters more than the day name. Are you trying to fill tables left empty by cancellations, or promote an event next month? Time-sensitive offers go out on their own timeline first, ideally inside the hours that work for you; industry best practice comes second.

Compare your own weekdays against your weekends in your campaign analytics, and run a simple A/B test: the same email on different days, then see which wins for your audience. Social media analytics will show you the same pattern for your followers.

There is one near-universal rule for days: avoid public holidays if you can.

3. How many times a month is the optimum for emailing customers?

The important bit is to be consistent and to work to a schedule of your own. Random sending ends up either too frequent or too rare, and you lose the ability to tell what worked. Watch your opt-out rate: a rising one is the clearest sign you are emailing too often.

And only send emails that provide value, never one just because it is time to send one.

Your loyal customers especially will appreciate tailored offers and updates coming through on a regular basis. They are highly engaged and want to hear from you. A schedule that works for most venues: a monthly newsletter, with shorter offer emails in between whenever there is something genuinely worth offering.

Need a hand with sending your emails to your customers, or got more questions around email marketing? Get in touch with our team.