The best time to send email so it will get read

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(MoneyWatch) For the past 18 months or so, I've been sending a monthly email out to a list of a few thousand people (who voluntarily gave me their addresses!) My open rate is somewhere between 35 percent and 44 percent.

This past month, I had a realization: the highest open rates tended to occur during the months that I sent the email on a Sunday afternoon.

This did not seem intuitive to me. Indeed, I'd actually avoided sending the email on weekends because I thought it would lower the open rate. Most of us try to be places other than our desks on Sundays, and doing things that don't involve email.

The 7 habits of highly effective emailers

But after talking with Alex Moore, CEO of Baydin, an email management service, I started to think about what was going on. Moore told me that emails sent from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. are about three times more likely to be opened than emails sent at 4 p.m.

Many of us know that we should "never check email in the morning" (to quote the title of Julie Morgenstern's excellent book). Yet we do. We show up at our workplaces, grab our coffee, and start pecking away at our inboxes, starting with the first unopened emails -- those sent at 6 a.m. or so. Any email sent then is "toward the top of the pile," says Moore, so it gets read.

By the end of the day, though, any given email gets buried in an avalanche of other emails. People are triaging and trying to get out the door and anything marginal or not related to the task at hand will just get deleted or ignored. That's why morning emails work so well.

Which makes sense -- but doesn't explain what I was finding. Why was Sunday afternoon working so well for me?

It turns out that in the smartphone era, many people do check email on Sundays. Any resolve to stay out of the inbox ends with Saturday. People are done partying. Sitting in the bleachers at a soccer game, or waiting for a game to come on, or puttering around the house, they're somewhat bored, and willing to do something that seems semi-productive. Since not too many messages come in on Sunday, yours might get read. And as for people who don't check email on Sunday? A 4 p.m. Sunday email looks a lot like a 6 a.m. Monday email from that perspective. They're both at the top of the pile.

So if you want an email to get read, send it Sunday afternoon or early in the morning.

[ProPartsNow]

Email is not on the way out. Its just a different medium. Texts are sort of like an ongoing conversation with a buddy. Email is a business tool.
What I like is that Laura found out the best open rate was Sunday afternoon, and that she shared her tip with us.
Like in my case, your best tip to save money on EZ-Go golf cart parts and accessories is at the ProPartsNow website, where its the same parts from the vender, and shipped straight through, but 15% less.

[Stacyknows]

I send out emails at different times of the day. But i find that its best to send emails when its raining or snowing.

I also send out email blasts on Sunday evenings, when I am not competing with the sale sites.

As for checking emails, that I do all day and night. I am thinking of having my smartphone surgically removed from my body

[Lor3442]

Communication patterns have changed drastically in the past few years. and for many, the "best time to send email so it gets read" is never. For many businesses, texting and instant messaging are replacing email as the preferred method of communication. And for the millennial generation, email just doesn't exist. Just ask parents who have emailed their college-age student and never get a response, then they text in a nano second, they get "hi mom." Email is still alive and well, but it is definitely on the wane. I read a lot of your posts, Laura, and as always, this was insightful and got my brain ticking! Thanks. Loraine Antrim

[lvanderkam]

Thanks! It is true that young people text but don't email as much. I wonder why that is -- it's not like the mediums are that different. But I do tend to text my babysitters, as that's how they like to communicate. Something to think about...