What day and time get the most LinkedIn replies?
Whenever they’re awake. The day barely matters.
Upscale Outreach ·
Barely any day or hour stands out. In the prospect’s own time and compared within the same campaigns, every weekday landed within 6% of the usual reply rate, Monday the slowest. The one time that cost replies was overnight: messages landing between midnight and 7am got 12% fewer.
Outscale benchmarks, from 112,991 prospects reached in real campaigns.
The day barely matters
We turned every message’s send time into the prospect’s own local time, then compared each day with what the same campaigns usually got. Every weekday landed within 6%. Monday was the slowest, at −6%.
- Monday−6%
- Tuesday+3%
- Wednesday+5%
- Thursday+3%
- Friday−1%
Neither does the hour, with one exception
Through the waking day, no hour moved replies by more than chance alone would. The one time that cost replies was overnight: messages that landed between midnight and 7am got 12% fewer.
- Midnight to 7am−12%
- 7 to 9am+10%
- 9am to noon+3%
- Noon to 2pm−5%
- 2 to 5pm+5%
- 5pm to midnight+9%
And 15% of messages landed in that window, about one in seven. Send windows get set in the sender’s time zone, and the prospect’s night is somebody else’s working day.
Why everyone wants a magic hour
“Tuesday at 10am” gets repeated because it sounds precise, and precise feels like control. Timing is also the easiest thing to change. The list and the message are hard work.
Prospects open LinkedIn in the gaps of every day: between meetings, over lunch, on the way home. A message that lands overnight joins the morning pile and gets sorted with everything else that arrived while they slept.
What to do today
- Set the send window to their daytime. Check each account’s window against the time zone of the people it writes to.
- Stop testing Tuesday against Thursday. Put the effort into who you write to: more in what matters most for LinkedIn acceptance rates.
More in messages and sequences
Is there a best time of year for LinkedIn outreach?
The holiday slump lives in the sender’s diary.
No. Across two years of real campaigns, messages sent in August got replies at 8.1%, the same as the average month, and December’s at 9.6%. Against each campaign’s own average, every month landed within 11%.
Read itHow long do LinkedIn prospects take to reply?
The no’s come fast. The maybes take their time.
Within hours: the median reply came 4 hours after our message, 72% within a day and 95% within a week. But the fastest are the most negative: 40% of replies inside the first hour were a plain no, against 24% of those that took over a week.
Read itHow long should you wait between LinkedIn follow-ups?
Anything from a day to a month. Past that, you’re a stranger again.
Anything from a day to four weeks. Compared within the same campaign and step, every gap in that range landed within 12% of the campaign’s usual reply rate. Wait more than a month and replies fell by 19%.
Read itHow many follow-up messages should you send on LinkedIn?
More than feels polite.
Don’t stop before the fifth message. In real campaigns, 26% of replies came to message three, four or five, and they were as often worth answering as replies to the first. About one follow-up in 2,000 drew an annoyed reply.
Read it