As a follow-up to last week’s “You’ve Got Mail”, I decided to research the best times of the day/week to send out email blasts. The results, as expected, were inconclusive. After all, it’s next to impossible to analyze the email habits of millions of people and define a “good” time to email anyone! A good second, however, is to read up on the theories that people have. Here’s a good place to start: New Insights on Time of Day for Email
In order to be a good blogger, I’ll add a few of my own ideas as well.
*Monday is always a bad idea: Mondays, just like any first day back in the office, are a horrid time to send anyone anything, particularly an email blast. The first thing I do when I see that my inbox has 120 messages is figure out which 100 can be deleted without even glancing at. We live in a world filled with SPAM, plan accordingly!
*Lunchtime is probably not a good idea: Lunchtime, while it seems like a good time to send an email, is probably not. Most people are going to be using that 30 minutes to Facebook or MySpace and do not want to be bothered with anything remotely resembling work that they are not on the clock for. The exception is, however, if you are sending an advertisement for something that I would actually care about reading about in my free time (such as a Swedish Massage or something of the sort). Just keep in mind that people like their free time. Plus, if they don’t check their email during lunch, they are most likely to return to a full inbox much like a Monday.
These are just a couple of my own ideas. Feel free to post your own. Whatever time of day or day of the week you decide to send that email out, just remember it does matter!