Wednesday, the best day to send SMS campaigns?

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Marketers are constantly wondering when is the best time to send SMS campaigns to be most effective. Proper timing is critical to the success of any marketing campaign, especially with SMS, which is especially concerned with being opened and read quickly.

At GoSMS, we analyzed SMS sending statistics from January 2022 to June 2023. Our primary goal was to determine which days proved to be the most popular in each industry.

Overall, Wednesday seems to be the most popular day of the week for texting. Our customers, regardless of the industry in which they do business, send the most SMS messages on this day. However, this is a general value. Let’s break down each business sector and see how much the days chosen for sending SMS vary.

We have divided the data into 8 sectors:

  • Retail
  • Financial Services
  • Healthcare
  • Financial Services
  • Insurance
  • Transportation
  • Entertainment
  • Public Services
  • Personal Services

The favourite day for retail is Monday


Mondays and Tuesdays are strong days for texting in the retail sector, with 40% of all messages in the sector being sent on these two days, 21% on Mondays and 19% on Tuesdays.

Thereafter, there is a noticeable mid-week decline. However, Wednesday is the least popular weekday with 14% of messages sent. This is followed by a slight increase on Thursday and Friday.

And how’s the weekend? You may be surprised here as you expect more retail sales to take place over the weekend compared to the rest of the week. However, the data in the chart does not match this.

Since consumers naturally gravitate towards browsing and buying goods on the weekend, there is no need for aggressive marketing. Whereas they then shop less early in the week, which means that changing this behavior requires more effort.

Monday is also a popular day for the financial sector

As customers use these services consistently throughout the working week, the trend from Monday to Friday is itself consistent. The weekend decline is no surprise then. Sunday is then the least popular day of the week.

The favourite day for healthcare is Tuesday

Healthcare is a very active sector for text messaging, having sent thousands of text messages during this period. The most popular day for sending is Tuesday, accounting for 19% of all messages sent. Again, it is noticeable here that weekdays are significantly busier than the weekend. Indeed, only 11% of SMS messages were sent between Saturday and Sunday in the health sector.

In addition, weekdays occupy a relatively similar proportion of the remaining messages. The fewest messages were sent on Wednesdays, with 17% sent during the week, compared to the most popular Tuesday with 19%.

The main reason why SMS messages are more likely to be sent on a weekday than at the weekend may be that the healthcare sector uses this channel of communication to send, for example, over-the-counter prescriptions.

The favourite day for insurance companies is Friday

The key difference between the insurance sector and the rest of the financial services sector is that Friday dominates compared to the rest of the week, accounting for 39% of all messages sent in this sector.

Take, as an example, clients of insurance companies specialising in temporary vehicle cover, such as van or car hire companies. Their end customers typically request these services at the end of the week – for example, hiring a van for the weekend.

The insurance provider then sends alerts to customers via SMS, such as confirmation of a recent insurance purchase. This is why the insurance industry is seeing an increase in messages sent on Fridays.

A popular day for transport is Thursday

Overall, Thursday is the most popular, but Tuesday is not far behind. This is probably because some companies run private valet car parks where they send parking SMS. This may explain why messages are sent more during the week – it’s a time when people tend to travel to work. However, as the trend of working from home becomes more prevalent, we can see that the data changes over time as people choose to work from home.

SMS is also commonly used in the transport sector as an internal shift management platform to help companies communicate with employees about working hours and shift changes. This can contribute to inconsistency as everything varies from company to company.

A popular day for entertainment is Tuesday

The entertainment industry is another example of a very diverse sector within SMS marketing. It is dominated more by promotional campaigns, similar to the retail sector. However, the data suggests that when it comes to SMS marketing, the entertainment industry tends to take an all-or-nothing approach, with very specific days taking up a huge proportion of messages sent, while other days show almost no activity.

The most popular day is Tuesday, which takes up 27% of all messages sent in the entertainment industry, closely followed by Monday and Thursday, which take up 24% and 22% respectively. These three days account for almost three-quarters of all messages sent in the industry.

Conversely, if we combine the volume of messages sent on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, the total is just 12%. Interestingly, Sunday, with 16% of all messages sent, has by far the highest proportion of messages sent on the weekend of all the industries we looked at. This is most likely an attempt to get consumers to spend more time entertaining themselves before the start of the new work week.

A popular day for utilities is Monday and Tuesday

While Monday and Tuesday see 18% of messages sent within the utilities sector, this is a very stable pattern throughout the working week, with the lowest day of the week – Thursday – taking 16%.

For water and energy providers in particular, use cases typically vary between one-way SMS messages, which include, for example, electricity consumption notifications, or two-way communications in the form of customer support.

For example, prior to a phone call with a customer support representative, a customer may be asked to reply to a text message with a range of options and communicate the one that best describes their problem. This information is then relayed to the employee handling the call.

Unsurprisingly, we are seeing a decline again this weekend. Customers tend to prefer to interact with utility contractors during the work week.

The favourite day for HR services is Tuesday

We see an interesting trend for the recruitment and staffing services sector. There is a small uptick at the start of the week followed by a clear decline heading into the weekend.

The most popular use case for SMS in this sector comes from temporary staffing coverage, where SMS is used to inform candidates about shifts.

At the same time, in selected cases, two-way conversational messages are also used to send details of the job, to which the candidate can reply “YES” or “NO”.

These types of messages make up a large portion of volume in staffing services, and it’s almost certainly why we see such strong performance on weekdays compared to the weekend.

Conclusion

We hope this in-depth article has given you a basic overview of how you can better time your SMS campaigns, and we also hope it has helped to point you to the many ways SMS can be used across business functions – both internally and externally. If you’re already using SMS as part of your marketing strategy, have you considered how you could expand your current use?

Or maybe you’re wondering how two-way conversations could improve your customer service. Whatever your situation, SMS messaging can be customized for an extremely wide range of scenarios and use cases.

Get inspired and create your next campaign in GoSMS. If you’re at the beginning of your SMS journey, sign up for a free trial credit with GoSMS. It’s really very easy and you can be sending your first SMS messages in minutes.