There’s a piece of advice that gets repeated constantly in email marketing circles. Send your newsletter on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. Avoid Mondays because people are catching up from the weekend. Avoid Fridays because people are checked out. Never send on the weekend.

It sounds reasonable. And it’s probably true that those mid-week days perform well on average.

But here’s the thing about “on average.” If everyone follows the same advice, everyone is competing for the same inbox space at the same time.

So what happens if you go the other way?

The Case for Testing Friday

We started wondering whether Friday might actually be an opportunity. Not because Friday is inherently a great day for email, but because most people assume it isn’t. That assumption clears the field.

If your competitors are all sending Tuesday through Thursday, your Friday newsletter might be the only one sitting in the inbox when your subscriber finally takes a breath at the end of the week.

It’s a theory. But theories need data.

What We Found

We started tracking our Friday sends against our mid-week sends across two different sites with different audience sizes. The results were close, which in itself is interesting.

For one site, Friday open rates came in slightly higher than mid-week sends on average. For the other, open rates were essentially identical. Neither finding is a slam dunk for Friday, but neither supports the conventional wisdom against it either.

Where Friday stood out more clearly was in clicks. Our most recent Friday send had the highest click count of any send we tracked across both sites. One data point doesn’t prove anything, but it’s worth noting.

The unsubscribe numbers also favored Friday. Fewer people unsubscribed on Friday sends than on mid-week sends. Again, small sample size, but directionally encouraging.

What This Actually Means

We’re not saying Friday is the best day to send email. We don’t have enough data to say that yet, and your audience might behave completely differently from ours.

What we are saying is that the conventional wisdom deserves to be tested rather than accepted. Every business has a different audience. Your subscribers might be checking email at different times, in different contexts, with different habits than the average subscriber on which industry benchmarks are based.

The only way to know what works for your list is to test it yourself.

Your Audience Is Unique

The guides that say “send on Tuesday” are based on aggregated data across enormous numbers of emails and industries. They’re a reasonable starting point. They are not a prescription.

A B2B software company selling to developers operates differently from a local service business. A weekly newsletter with a loyal audience behaves differently than a promotional email going to a cold list. The right send time for one is not necessarily the right send time for the other.

Start with the conventional wisdom if you need a starting point. But then test it. Look at your own open rates, click rates, and unsubscribe patterns by day of the week. Let your data tell you what your audience actually does, not what the average audience does.

You might find that Tuesday works best for you. You might find that Friday is your sweet spot. Either answer is the right answer, as long as it comes from your own data.

We’ll keep testing and share what we find.