The Best Time to Send Internal Emails (and How to Test It)

I once worked for an organization with employees across the globe, using an outdated practice of sending most internal emails at a time that worked for the majority of employees. It worked when the team was small and primarily located in a single office, but internal email practices failed to keep pace with company growth and geographic expansion. 

Eventually, we had employees across the globe receiving critical company communications long after their workday ended, late into the evening. And as all good internal communicators know, essential messages can (and will) get lost if they land at the wrong time. 

That’s where strategic timing comes in. By understanding benchmarks for when employees are most likely to open and act on messages and combining those insights with a simple testing framework, IC teams can improve the impact of every send.

In this guide, you’ll learn why timing is crucial in the world of internal emails and get a step-by-step, practical approach to finding the best time to send internal emails in your organization. Plus, benchmarks and best practices for optimizing when to send internal emails.

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Why Timing Matters in Internal Email Engagement

When the content of internal emails doesn’t resonate with employees, it’s instinctual to assume the content is the issue. But send timing is often an overlooked and controllable lever for email engagement. Understanding when to send internal emails is foundational to any effective internal email strategy. 

Correlation between timing and open rates

There’s an often unspoken relationship between send time and internal email open rates. Employees engage with email at work in seemingly predictable patterns shaped by factors such as: 

• Time zone: Be cognizant of employees spread across time zones, even if only a small handful are in one location. 
• Role-type: Frontline, desk-based, hybrid, field, and shift workers check email at different times (some might even use email far less frequently, if at all, compared to others). 
• Meeting density: Employees with meeting-heavy calendars may be harder to reach than those without. 
• Work rhythms: Employees may ignore their inbox during deep work and focus time sessions, and work rhythms may vary by team and individual. 
• Content type/urgency: Emails that appear urgent (either because the subject line says so, or because of the content itself, such as a layoff announcement) may cut through work patterns more than other types of emails. 
• Psychological readiness and mental energy: Emails allow employees to engage when they have the time and energy to process and respond to information, which varies by individual.

From an internal comms perspective, timing matters because internal emails compete with all of the above. Optimizing timing helps improve internal email open rates when your message is already solid.

Benchmarks: average open rates by day/time

Internal email benchmarks provide directional guardrails to work toward. There’s value in understanding the rhythms and nuance of your organization from an industry perspective, as well as from an individual perspective (meaning, it’s essential to have company-specific internal email benchmarks).

According to ContactMonkey’s 2025 Internal Email Benchmark Report, here’s what “good” average open rates look like across a handful of industries (download the report for data across 20 sectors): 

As shown above, open rates and the best time to send internal emails vary depending on multiple factors centered around the employee experience. That’s why benchmarks are most valuable when you pair them with internal testing and internal email analytics so you can understand how your organization operates.

IC vs. marketing email timing differences

While there’s undoubtedly some overlap between internal communication and marketing practices, email timing is one area where these areas of expertise differ. In most cases, employee behavior doesn’t mirror consumer behavior. While marketing email tactics and benchmarks can offer inspiration, applying them directly to internal email communications can lead to missed expectations, lower engagement, and potentially broken trust. 

At a fundamental level, internal and marketing emails serve different purposes, including: 

• Opt-in vs. must receive: Employees don’t choose to subscribe to internal emails; instead, organizations add them to email lists to share relevant information. Without the ability to decide whether to receive internal emails, it’s up to internal communicators to ensure the content is appropriate and engaging. 
• Conversion vs. comprehension: Marketing email timing is fundamentally driven by buyer persuasion, and urgency is a lever that drives action. From an internal comms perspective, the best send time is when employees can realistically absorb (and, when relevant, act on) the information. Overusing urgency and conversion-centric tactics can lead to employee distrust.
• Trends vs. context: Marketing email campaigns might follow hot trends, increasing email frequency during relevant cultural moments. Effective internal comms often require strategic planning and a build-up of information over time, unique to the organization, rather than hot, in-the-moment blasts.

When internal comms teams align timing with how employees actually work, they increase employee email engagement and ensure messages feel more intentional. 

Benchmark Data: Best Days and Times to Send Internal Emails

Benchmarks don’t provide a concrete answer on when to send internal emails. But they do give you a smart starting point for testing and optimization. The most effective IC teams use benchmarks to inform hypotheses, then validate them through internal email analytics within their own organizations. The goal is to study your workforce and identify patterns that reflect your team’s behavior. Here are some general guidelines and tips to help you do this in your org: 

Weekdays vs. weekends

For many organizations, weekday sends are more effective than weekends, but that guideline only holds if your team primarily works during the week. Weekends could be helpful to shift workers or even professors who don’t spend much time checking email until the weekend, for example. 

Ask yourself:

• When do our employees work? Are there workdays when they are less active on email than on other days? (e.g., Maybe employees  work Monday-Friday, but Tuesday-Wednesday are better send days.)
• Are there windows outside their traditional working hours when they may be more likely to engage or prefer? Do specific roles disengage entirely outside of scheduled working hours? 
• Are we sending messages that can afford a multi-day reader lag time? (e.g., If we send an email on Saturday, but our employees are most active on email on Tuesday, can the message wait that long?)

Morning vs. afternoon

Like day of week, time of day impacts open rates, and more importantly, the capacity to act. Nailing this piece can be the difference between influencing behavior and simply becoming noise.

Questions to consider:

• When do employees start and end their workday? 
• What does a typical workday look like? Are mornings filled with standups, meetings, and shift changes? What about afternoons?
• In what window(s) are our team members most active on email? Does this vary by team?

Industry-specific differences (desk workers vs. frontline)

Finally, being mindful of your industry is crucial, as best send times not only vary across organizations, but can (and often do) look widely different across types of roles. 

Ask yourself:

• Do employees work primarily at desks, on the floor, or in the field? What do their schedules look like? Do different functional areas need different timing strategies? 
• Do frontline teams have access to email during work hours? Do they actively check email during work hours, or before or after their shifts?
• If supporting non-desk-based employees, are they using mobile devices to check email? How does that affect our strategy?

One organization might need multiple “best send times” for optimal effectiveness. 

How to Test the Best Time for Your Company

Finding the best time to send internal emails isn’t a one-size-fits-all recipe, but rather, a custom brew of employee context, data, and experimentation. Internal communicators who adopt a structured but flexible approach can identify timing windows that maximize internal email engagement. Follow this practical, step-by-step approach to test the best time for your organization (even with limited resources);

Define engagement goals (open, CTR, read time)

Every good internal communications experiment starts with a clear definition of what success looks like. Before you conduct any testing, consider and outline the goals you want to achieve. Not all internal emails serve the same purpose, so it’s important to choose goals that actually reflect the internal communication objectives you want to achieve. 

Below are some metrics to consider including in your goals:

• Internal email open rates: Measuring internal email open rate can give you a quick indication of whether your send time is meeting employees at a time that works well for them. 
• Click through rates (CTR): A high CTR might tell you that you are sending emails when employees have time to complete actions; whereas a low CTR could signal there isn’t enough time to complete an action upon receiving the email, or your call-to-action (CTA) could use adjusting. 
• Read time: If your internal email isn’t action-oriented, consider using read time to understand whether you are reaching employees at a good time for them. Maybe they have time to open an email, but not enough time to consume and absorb it. 

Selecting a primary metric helps orient your internal email toward a specific direction, which is imperative for testing. Document your engagement goal alongside the email content and audience. This creates a reference point for your test results and helps explain decisions to managers or stakeholders.

Set up A/B tests (timing variations)

Once you define your engagement goals, you can test when employees are most likely to engage. A/B testing is a low-friction, low-risk method for experimenting with send times while minimizing disruption. 

Here’s how to run a practical A/B test for internal email send time:

1. Choose a single variable to test. Ideally, start with the send time or the day of the week, but don’t change both at once. 
2. Use the same internal email template and subject line. Again, the goal here is to reduce the number of variables you change to ensure clean send time data. Focus on crafting an internal email that is engaging.
3. Identify your audience segments. Determine who your audience is. Are you testing send time for all staff emails? Do you want to run a test on a smaller segment of employees, such as two groups of frontline workers?
4. Test your send timing variations across multiple sends. One send likely isn’t enough to validate your hypothesis, as it doesn’t account for variations in employee behavior. 

Not sure where to start? Here’s where I’d prioritize focusing:

• If you send a weekly or even monthly all-staff email (e.g., an internal email newsletter or a leadership update), consider whether you want to try another send time. For this particular use case, I’d recommend testing the time of day, not the day of the week, unless you communicate to your organization in advance that they’ll receive the email on a different day.
• If you support frontline teams, consider testing send time at the start of the day versus the end of the day. Be sure to schedule your emails around their shift times to minimize disruption. 
• If you support a hybrid team, you might experiment with the day of the week and test in-office versus remote days to gauge how emails land in different settings.

Even minor timing adjustments can significantly impact internal email open rates and engagement. Over time, A/B testing uncovers employee email patterns you can adopt. 

Use analytics dashboards to measure results

Testing is only valuable if you can measure, interpret, and act on the results. An internal communications email platform or internal email software can surface patterns and highlight opportunities for improvement.

The best internal comms platforms will help you track:

• Open rates by send time and day 
• CTRs and read time analysis for action and deeper engagement understanding
• Segment-specific engagement (location, department, etc.) 
• Engagement data comparisons across internal emails 

With meaningful analytics dashboards, internal communicators can look for consistent trends rather than isolated spikes. Additionally, quantitative data provides insights for internal comms pros to pair with qualitative feedback from employees to improve the overall internal communication strategy.

PRO TIP: Test and refine internal email send times for your organization, and then create a “send-time playbook” for different types of internal emails. Share it with all new members of the internal comms team for consistent implementation.

Practical Best Practices for Send Time Optimization

Send time optimization is less of a science and more of an art, meaning you can’t apply a simple equation and hope it works. Instead, learning how to make data-driven decisions while maintaining a human-centered approach is the best way to tackle this challenge. Here’s how to blend data and employee behavior: 

Align with employee schedules

The foundation of send-time optimization is understanding when employees are most likely to engage. Different roles, departments, and work styles mean one “best time” rarely fits all. When possible, align send times (and optimization experiments) with the specifics of each employee group. Don’t forget to consider the factors outlined above, including time zone, role-type, meeting density, work rhythms, content type/urgency, and psychological readiness and mental energy. 

Segment audiences (time zones, shifts)

Most internal communicators recognize that one-size-fits-all messaging often fails to meet employees where they are, especially in organizations with employee populations spread across time zones, work shifts, responsibilities, and more. To overcome this, internal comms teams can improve internal messaging by segmenting audiences accordingly. The reality is that segmentation varies depending on each organization’s makeup and employee preferences, so ICers need to understand, define, and test what works best for their people. Segmenting sends ensures that your internal emails land when employees can actually read and act on them, rather than when it’s convenient for the sender.

Balance consistency with experimentation

Internal communication experimentation doesn’t need to look or feel grandiose. Unless you have specific orders to rewrite your entire internal communications approach from scratch, it’s better to avoid creating constant cycles of disruption and distraction. Unnecessary friction and chaos hinder employees’ perception of internal communication and can do more harm than good. Balancing consistency with experimentation is the best way to maintain trust while constantly improving (even if only in taking baby steps).  

Balance consistency with experimentation by:

• Leaning into a predictable cadence for recurring information to signal regular and reliable timing
• Layering in small experiments (i.e., send time changes) without disrupting predictability (and communicating ahead of time if a send time will change drastically to prevent confusion) 
• Tracking results over time using internal email analytics to validate testing 
• Communicating changes thoughtfully rather than acting on data without sharing your reasoning 

Tools to Help Test and Optimize Send Times

Testing and optimizing internal email timing is easier when IC teams have the right tools, but the good news is that you can experiment with internal email send times, no matter where you are starting from. Here’s how:

Native Outlook/Gmail scheduling

Both Outlook and Gmail provide native scheduling features that allow you to schedule an email to send on a specific date and time. If you don’t have access to an internal comms platform, you can use the scheduling features Outlook and Gmail offer to test different internal email send times. 

While Outlook and Gmail scheduling don’t provide internal email analytics, you can try sending emails at different times and asking for employee feedback to find what works for your organization. This approach might work for small teams and startups where you can easily and quickly gather feedback. Additionally, I’d recommend creating a tracker (either a document or a spreadsheet) to record email send times, topics, and employee feedback.

While native scheduling is sufficient for small, low-complexity emails, internal communicators quickly outgrow these tools when they want to prioritize internal email send time optimization at scale (with data to back it up). 

ContactMonkey analytics + A/B testing

ContactMonkey integrates directly with Outlook and Gmail, turning your everyday email client into a powerful internal communications hub with internal email analytics to help you monitor and improve send times.

With ContactMonkey, internal communicators can:

• Access internal communication email metrics like open rates, click through rates, location, device type, and read time as soon as internal emails land
• Measure internal email engagement at scale with internal email benchmark performance across departments, locations, or roles
• Identify trends and employee behaviors across multiple email sends to find send times that work for your organization 
• A/B test subject lines, visuals, send times, CTAs, and more

When communicators see what’s working, they can replicate it. When they know what’s not, they can adjust immediately.

Example case study of improvement

A tool like ContactMonkey can make a big difference in your organization. Take Freedom Mobile, a telecommunications provider. As their organization transitioned from one parent company to another, the case to keep ContactMonkey year after year became clearer. With ContactMonkey, Freedom Mobile achieved: 

• A 15% average increase in open rates across various internal audiences 
• A jump in read metrics from 32% to 40%, demonstrating deeper content engagement
• The ability to customize send times to meet the needs and engagement preferences of their employees

ContactMonkey helps Freedom Mobile find the best time to send internal emails through real-time analytics and audience-specific performance data. This combination helped their team move beyond distributing emails, allowing them to shape the employee experience with internal email precision.

Optimizing Internal Email Send Time for Maximum Impact

Effective internal email timing is about understanding employee routines and behavior, testing strategically, and using data to inform decision-making and unlock deeper email engagement. 
Book a demo to see how ContactMonkey helps you send internal emails at the right time, to the right people, backed by engagement data.