Is Saturday a Good Time to Send an Email? Here's What 15 Billion Emails Say

It's Friday afternoon. Your campaign's ready - subject line tested, segments built, creative approved. But you missed the Tuesday window, and Monday feels like a lifetime away. So you start wondering: is Saturday a good time to send an email?

You're not alone. The answer is messier than most "best time to send" articles admit. The data spans 15.6 billion emails across six major platforms, and it doesn't all agree.

The Short Version

• B2B cold email or marketing? Hard no. Tuesday at 10 AM remains the consensus best. Saturday B2B sends get buried or deleted Monday morning.
• B2C retail, lifestyle, entertainment? Conditional yes. Saturday morning (9-10 AM) drives opens. Saturday evening (8 PM) drives clicks. Expect open rates in the 22-26% range for lifestyle and retail brands.
• Newsletters? Test it, but don't expect miracles. Saturday pulls the lowest open rate in beehiiv's 15.6B-email dataset.

The math is simple: weekdays account for over 85% of total email opens and roughly 95% of all clicks, per Brevo's platform data. Saturday is fighting for scraps.

But scraps can be valuable if you're in the right vertical.

What Six Platforms Report About Saturday Email Performance

Every platform tells a slightly different story because they're measuring different audiences, different email types, and different definitions of "open."

The Numbers, Platform by Platform

*MailerLite reports weekend performance as "similar to weekday averages." Saturday best open rate at 9 AM is 48.9%. Click rate estimated from Friday benchmark (8.09%). **Mindbaz figures represent weekend averages (Saturday + Sunday combined), not Saturday-only.

A few things jump out. beehiiv's 35.48% looks high - but their entire user base is newsletter creators with engaged subscriber lists. Klaviyo's 11.29% looks terrible - but they filtered out machine opens and measure e-commerce buyers, not newsletter readers. MailerLite sits in the middle, noting that Saturday and Sunday performance is "similar to weekday" across their 2.1M+ campaigns.

Why These Numbers Disagree

Different audiences. A beehiiv newsletter subscriber chose to get that email. A Klaviyo e-commerce recipient checked a box at checkout six months ago. Engagement baselines are completely different.

Machine-open filtering. Klaviyo removes machine opens from their data. beehiiv doesn't specify. Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflates open rates by roughly 18 percentage points and affects about 46% of email clients. Any dataset that doesn't filter for this is overstating opens - especially on weekends, when personal devices (iPhones) dominate. This is the single most important caveat when comparing weekend email data, and most "best time to send" articles ignore it entirely.

Volume effects. Saturday accounts for roughly 5-7% of weekly email volume. When fewer emails go out, averages get noisy. MailerLite's "similar to weekday" finding might partly reflect small sample sizes inflating weekend numbers.

The Weekend CTR Paradox

Open rates aren't the whole story - and this is where Saturday gets interesting.

Customer.io's analysis found that the highest click-through rates actually occur on weekends. Fewer emails in the inbox means less competition for attention. People who do open your Saturday email have more time to actually read it and click.

Mindbaz's data backs this up partially. Weekend open rates beat weekdays (24% vs. 22%), but click rates were lower (2.5% vs. 2.9%). That seems contradictory until you look at their mobile CTR stat: 72% on weekends vs. 55% on weekdays. People are reading on phones, and phone behavior is different - more browsing, less clicking through to websites.

Here's the thing: most teams are over-indexing on open rates when click-through rate is the metric that actually correlates with revenue. If Saturday represents 5-7% of weekly email volume but pulls 10-12% of weekly engagement, that's a disproportionate return. The unsubscribe rate is actually lower on weekends too (0.12% vs. 0.15%), which tells you people aren't annoyed by Saturday emails - they're just less likely to act immediately.

Saturday emails get seen. Whether they get clicked depends entirely on what you're asking people to do. A "read this article" CTA works. A "schedule a demo" CTA doesn't.

B2B vs. B2C: The Split That Decides Everything

Remote and flex work have blurred traditional 9-to-5 email patterns since 2020 making weekend engagement more viable than historical data suggested. But the B2B/B2C divide still dominates.

B2B - Don't Do It

If you're sending B2B emails on Saturday - marketing or cold outreach - stop.

Tuesday at 10 AM is the optimal B2B send time across virtually every study. Chase Dimond's practitioner-level data shows Tuesday open rates of 18-20%, consistently the highest of any weekday. B2B professionals deal with 100+ emails per day during the workweek. On Saturday, they're not checking their work inbox. And if they are, they're triaging - deleting anything that isn't urgent.

With 61% of B2B emails opened on mobile, there's a theoretical argument that weekend mobile usage could help. In practice, we've never seen a B2B campaign where Saturday outperformed a Tuesday or Wednesday send. The inbox context is wrong - people aren't in buying mode.

B2C - Here's Where Saturday Earns Its Keep

Consumers check personal email on weekends. They browse. They shop. B2C Saturday open rates land in the 22-26% range for lifestyle and retail brands - not chart-topping, but solid enough to justify testing.

Mailchimp's data - drawn from billions of addresses - shows retail and e-commerce emails perform best "especially on Thursdays through Saturdays," matching when consumers actually browse and buy. That's a direct endorsement of Saturday for retail brands. Nonprofits see higher engagement with emails sent during evenings and weekends too. The emotional, mission-driven content that nonprofits send resonates when people have mental space to care.

The B2C Sunday evening window is also worth noting. MailMonitor's benchmarks show B2C campaigns often performing better on Sunday evenings, as people mentally prepare for the week ahead.

Best Time to Send an Email on Saturday (If You're Going to Do It)

If Saturday makes sense for your audience, timing within the day matters. Two distinct windows serve different goals.

The Morning Window: 9-10 AM Local Time

This is the "Saturday morning couch scroll" window. People wake up, grab coffee, check their phone. MailerLite's data shows opens peaking at 9 AM on weekends. Mailchimp's send-time optimization system recommends 10 AM in the recipient's time zone - not yours.

That "local time" detail matters. If you're blasting your entire list at 10 AM EST, you're hitting West Coast subscribers at 7 AM. Segment by time zone or use your ESP's send-time optimization feature.

Best for: newsletters, content roundups, event announcements - anything where an open is the primary goal.

The Evening Window: 8 PM

Clicks and engagement peak here. Moosend's analysis of 10 billion emails found click-through rates peaking between 8-9 PM. People have finished their Saturday activities. They're on the couch. They have time to read, browse, and actually click through to your site.

Best for: promotional emails, product launches, flash sales - anything where you need the recipient to take action.

The one rule for both windows: mobile optimization. Weekend email is overwhelmingly mobile - 72% mobile CTR vs. 55% on weekdays. If your email doesn't render perfectly on a phone, Saturday will punish you harder than any weekday.

Industries Where Saturday Actually Works

Retail and E-commerce

The strongest Saturday case. Mailchimp's billions-of-addresses dataset explicitly calls out Thursday through Saturday as peak performance days for retail. Consumers are in shopping mode, browsing deals, comparing products. If you're in e-commerce and you're not testing Saturday morning sends, you're leaving money on the table.

Sporting Goods

An interesting outlier. Klaviyo's industry breakdown shows Sunday as the highest click-rate day for sporting goods at 2.79% - the only vertical where a weekend day tops the chart. Saturday benefits from the same dynamic: people planning weekend activities and gear purchases.

BFCM 2025 Proves the Saturday Shopping Thesis

During BFCM 2025, Nosto's analysis across 1,000+ stores showed BFCM Saturday outperforming Black Friday on year-over-year growth: +20.23% in sales, +22.83% in conversion rate. Yes, that's a promotional event - but it demonstrates that consumers absolutely buy on Saturdays when given a reason.

Nonprofits and Lifestyle/Fitness

Higher engagement with evening and weekend sends for nonprofits. Mission-driven content resonates when people have mental space to care. Similarly, Saturday morning is when people think about self-improvement - a gym promotion or wellness newsletter at 9 AM Saturday hits a receptive audience. AWeber's data on lifestyle and fitness verticals supports this pattern.

Should You Send Cold Emails on Weekends?

The Reddit sales community is split down the middle on this one.

The bull case: less inbox competition means your email is more likely to be seen. On a Tuesday, your prospect gets 100+ emails. On Saturday, maybe 10.

The bear case: prospects do a Monday morning purge. They see a sales email that arrived Saturday at 11 AM and delete it without reading. Worse - they mentally flag you as "that person who emails on weekends."

Based on B2B engagement patterns, expect Saturday cold email response rates to run 15-25% below your Tuesday/Wednesday baseline. That's a meaningful gap. If you do send cold outreach on weekends, reserve it for warm leads who've already engaged with your brand - not top-of-funnel prospects seeing your name for the first time.

Real talk: timing is maybe the fifth most important variable in cold email. List quality, relevance, subject line, and offer all matter more. I've seen teams obsess over send-time optimization while running 25% bounce rates. That's like optimizing your golf swing while playing with a tennis ball.

Here's what actually kills cold email campaigns: bad data. Sending to invalid addresses, spam traps, and catch-all domains tanks your sender reputation regardless of when you hit send. A 5%+ bounce rate on any campaign - Saturday or Tuesday - triggers ISP throttling that takes weeks to recover from.

That's where list verification becomes non-negotiable. Prospeo runs every address through a 5-step verification process - catch-all handling, spam-trap removal, honeypot filtering - delivering 98% email accuracy. The free tier gives you 75 verifications per month, enough to test whether your Saturday experiment is even worth running.

Better Alternatives to Saturday Sends

Skip Saturday entirely? These three windows consistently outperform it:

Friday at 6 PM. MailerLite's data shows Friday as the highest open-rate day (49.72%) and evening as the peak click window. It's the Saturday benefit - relaxed browsing, fewer competing emails - without the Saturday risk.

Sunday 8-10 PM. Emails sent Sunday evening land at the top of Monday morning inboxes. For B2B, this is the sneaky play - your email is the first thing they see when they start their week. For B2C, it catches the Sunday-night planning mindset.

Tuesday at 10 AM. The safe default. Every major platform - Mailchimp, HubSpot, MailMonitor, Campaign Monitor - converges on Tuesday morning as the highest-engagement window. You won't set any records, but you won't embarrass yourself either.

AI send-time optimization is the real answer if your ESP supports it. Customer.io reports a 23% lift in open rates when using AI-powered send-time optimization vs. static timing. That's bigger than any day-of-week difference in the data. Mailchimp, Klaviyo, and Brevo all offer some version of this - use it. (If you want the mechanics, see AI send-time optimization.)

How to Test Saturday for Your Audience

Don't take anyone's data as gospel - including the data in this article. Your audience is unique. Here's how to test Saturday properly:

Set up a clean A/B test. Split your list randomly - minimum 1,000 recipients per variant. Send variant A on Saturday morning (9-10 AM local time). Send variant B on your current best-performing weekday and time. Same subject line, same content, same segment. (If you need a framework, use this A/B test structure.)

Start with a verified list. Bounce rates skew test results. If 8% of your Saturday variant bounces and 3% of your Tuesday variant bounces, you're not measuring timing - you're measuring list quality. Verify before you send so your test actually measures what you think it's measuring. A deeper walkthrough: verify an email address.

Run the test for at least four weeks. One Saturday isn't enough. Holidays, weather, news cycles, and random noise all affect a single send.

Segment by engagement history. Your most engaged subscribers might love Saturday emails. Your dormant segment might unsubscribe. Test on your active segment first, then expand. (If you’re not doing it already, learn how to segment your email list.)

FAQ

What is the best time to send an email on Saturday?

9-10 AM local time maximizes opens during the morning scroll; 8 PM maximizes clicks when people have leisure time to act. Mailchimp recommends 10 AM in the recipient's own time zone. Segment your list geographically or use your ESP's send-time optimization to avoid hitting subscribers at odd hours.

Do Saturday emails get deleted on Monday morning?

B2B cold emails face a real Monday-morning purge risk - prospects bulk-delete weekend messages before starting their workweek. For B2C marketing emails, the risk is much lower because subscribers opted in and expect your content. The deletion problem is primarily a cold outreach issue, not a marketing one.

Is Saturday or Sunday better for sending emails?

Neither day clearly wins across all audiences. MailerLite's data shows similar performance for both. Sunday evening (8-10 PM) has a slight edge because emails land at the top of Monday morning inboxes, giving you prime positioning. For e-commerce, Saturday morning tends to outperform Sunday morning.

Does sending emails on Saturday hurt deliverability?

ISPs don't penalize weekend sends. What hurts deliverability is high bounce rates, spam complaints, and poor list hygiene on any day. Verify your list first - tools like Prospeo offer 75 free verifications per month with 98% accuracy, enough to catch spam traps and invalid addresses before they damage your sender reputation.

Should e-commerce brands send promotional emails on Saturday?

Mailchimp's data shows retail emails perform well Thursday through Saturday, when consumers actively browse and buy. Klaviyo's e-commerce data is less optimistic, placing Saturday as the lowest-performing day. Test with at least 1,000 recipients over four consecutive Saturdays before committing budget to weekend campaigns.