What’s the best day to publish your newsletter?
Following up to our previous article, here is another look at the most frequently asked question: What the best day and time to publish a newsletter. Michael Katz, founder and Chief Penguin at Blue Penguin Development offers us the following recommendations:
Stay away from early morning.
The first thing your readers do when they arrive at the office is check e-mail. Since most of them spend more time away from their computers overnight than during any other period, it stands to reason that the biggest backlog — and therefore, the greatest tendency to delete all but the most critical — will occur when they first check in the morning. We don’t want our newsletters in this pile. For the same reason, I wouldn’t send a newsletter after about 4PM, since for anybody who doesn’t get to it today, 4PM turns into tomorrow morning.
Stay away from Mondays (or Tuesdays after a long weekend).
As with early morning, it all backs up over the weekend (if your audience is made up of businesspeople), and we need to steer clear. In fact, I avoid the first day after the weekend entirely, since it tends to be a day when people are scrambling and eager to clear the decks of anything “unnecessary.”
Pay attention to time zones.
If most of your important readers (i.e. the ones who are most likely to become clients) are in the same location as you, it’s easy. If however, they’re spread out all over the country or world, you may have to split the difference a bit to minimize the overnight problem. See if you can find a time of day that is between 9AM and 4PM for most readers.
Hit ‘em where they ain’t.
There have been — and continue to be — all kinds of studies which attempt to isolate the best day/time to send. Don’t take these at face value however, since different companies have different audiences and different objectives, and what works “in general” may not apply to you.
For me, as somebody sending a “thought piece” — as opposed to an e-mail looking for an immediate response or purchase — I look for the day and time where I think my readers are ready to take a little break from their working day and think about something else. In my case, mid-morning on Friday seems to be about right. Your readers may be different however, so give some thought to who they are and when they will be most inclined to hear your message.
Bottom Line: With E-Newsletters, content is what matters most. If you don’t have that taken care of, there is no best day/time to send. That said, you’ll increase your chances of avoiding the dreaded delete key if you take into account when your readers are least interested in throwing everything (including you) overboard.