This week Media Post published an article : “New Insights On Time Of Day For Email” which whilst it doesn’t reveal THE secret time to to send (hint – because there isn’t one!), does provide some very interesting observations performed by the Center for Media Design.

• Email engagement peaks in the morning. Many users, myself included, start their day by rifling through their email inboxes. Mornings allow email users to spend uninterrupted time in their inbox.
  

• In-out-in-out in the afternoon. As the day progresses, users tend to have more fractured interactions with email. Email is checked intermittently throughout the day between meetings and errands. Thus, in the afternoon, there are more email episodes (any time users check into their email inbox), but those episodes are shorter in duration. Between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m., users are likely to have five individual episodes of 3-5 minutes apiece, compared to the 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. period when users are more likely to have a single episode that is substantially longer.
  

• Overall time in the inbox is fairly consistent throughout the workday. Between the hours of 8 a.m. and 3 p.m., email makes up between 30% and 35% of the average user’s media exposure. This drops off during the late afternoon and early evening, only to peak again in the late evening (between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m.) as users go back to their inboxes to wrap up the day.

Along these lines, Skip Fidura has also written a very interesting post on the related subject of which is the best day to send email…. and comes to the conclusion that: “A standard day of week test randomly puts your readers into buckets so you end up identifying the optimal day based on the average. This would hide the fact that your most profitable segments might respond better at other times. In fact, the optimum time identified by the test may turn out to be rubbish.”

BUT, don’t despair!  Skip goes on to propose a strategy to ensure you’re sending on the right day for your customers…. Read the post