Okay, it’s not really spam. But I was asked to send out a mass-e-mailing; think along the lines of a company or organization newsletter. The people receiving it have some relationship to the sender, so it’s not completely out of the blue, though many of them are receiving it just because they’re in someone’s Rolodex, not necessarily because they requested this newsletter (though some did specifically subscribe). The contents could be helpful to some readers. Suffice to say, no one’s dying to read it, but no one is really actively hostile to it (we know because we include an unsubscribe link and only a few people a month unsubscribe).
So . . . I argued against sending it out at 4:30 Friday. My theory: Many recipients (esp. in time zones to the east) will have left for the weekend (or taken Friday off). Others will be wrapping up work trying to get out. For the people who are already gone, they will come back in on Tuesday and see this msg. as one of 15 in their inbox after a long weekend, and will be more prone to delete it so they can get on with catching up with their ‘real’ work. Or, some may get it on a Blackberry or other device over the weekend, and because it’s too long and graphics-heavy to read on a Blackberry, may just delete it then.
No, I argued, let’s send it Tuesday (after lunch) – people will have dug out from their backlog of e-mail, will be coming back to lunch, and may be more prone to take the ten minutes to glance at the e-mail, see if something catches their eye enough to click through, etc.
The reaction from others was that I was an idiot, and that the thing was no more or less likely to get read based on when it was sent. One guy made the counterargument that some people treat Friday p.m. as a ‘decompression’ time and that reading something not-strictly-work-related might be attractive to someone winding down from the week, or maybe they would print it out and take it home for the weekend – so maybe Friday was better.
If anyone’s aware of any studies regarding the best time to send e-mail and have a chance of its getting read, I’d be grateful for a cite.
But otherwise . . . at what time/day of the week would you be most likely (or least unlikely) to (a) open and (b) read in detail an e-mail of this type?
I think we’ll get a bit of practical insight into this this month because our e-mails have embedded spyware, er, tracking functionality that generates a report telling us how many people (and who) opened them at all, read specific items, etc. It’s been running at a fairly depressing rate of almost 50% of recipients deleting the e-mails before even opening, and of those who do open, only a small percentage clicking through to any articles – and the newsletter has recently been going out late Friday. We’ll see what happens this time around.