Time your Ontraport campaigns with precision
How do you time your email campaigns to maximise reach and open rates? Should you send first thing in the morning, or late in the afternoon?
While Ontraport collects data on open rates by the time of day, until now this data has not been easily accessible. Vital Stats’ new Open Rates by Time of Day Report now gives you the ability to quickly visualise where in the day your messages are gaining traction, and where they’re getting lost.
This report can be automatically generated from your data, so sign up now and you’ll be able to track the performance of your emails, in a matter of minutes.
This is how the report lays out:

This gives you a side-by-side comparison of the last 30 days and the previous 30 days. You can see the chart display options are:
- Sends
- Sends previous 30 days
- Opens
- Opens previous 30 days
- Open Rate
- Open Rate previous 30 days
Remember, if you click on the coloured dot next to each description, you can easily toggle in and out the particular metrics you want to focus on.
When Do I Send It?
Open Rates (expressed as a percentage of total sends, purple line), is the best way to get a standardised understanding of time-of-day performance, and is what most clients focus on.
So for the client in the example below, they had open rate spikes around 10am and 3pm – you could call these the work day humps. This pattern is quite common.

However, every business serves different customers, and it’s best to experiment with your own database to find out what works.
For example, one client found she had a spike in the early evening. She was targeting young mothers and this was probably just after the kids had gone to bed.
Another client, in the gaming space, found they had an open rate spike in the late evening, because, well, the night belongs to gamers.
Another client found they had a spike around 6 a.m, because …who knows why? He didn’t understand the logic of this, result but you don’t need to understand the logic to make it work. If that’s when your customers open, that’s when they open.
When Are Your Customers Ready for You?
If you are looking to improve the performance of your email marketing campaigns, the Open Rate by Time of Day Gauge is an excellent option. It is located in the Standard Suite of gauges in the Vital Stats dashboard finder.
Sign up for a 14 day trial and your data will automatically populate the gauge in a matter of minutes.
But it doesn’t stop there. This is just one of many amazing dashboard reports that give you practical and profound insight into your business performance, in real time, from your Ontraport data.
Vital Stats: Learn to Love Data.