By Joe DiDonato | Chief of Staff | Baker Communications
Although there are many opinions on this, the overwhelming evidence points to Tuesday as the best time to send an email to a prospect or client. And if you have to do a follow-up email, the 2nd best day is Thursday, followed by the 3rd best day which is Wednesday.
The next element to consider is the time of the day. The best time is 10:00 AM in the morning, followed by 8 PM at night, 2 PM in the afternoon, and finally 6 AM in the morning. These may reflect the level or the role of the person you’re dealing with in the company. Oftentimes, more senior and operational people only have the evenings and early mornings to look at email. That’s going to be a judgement call on your part, but 10:00 AM is considered the prime time to send an email.
You can try all 12 combinations to see what stacks up as the best, but that only works if your clients are in the same time zone. This is where you have to take your best guess, but that’s why 10:00 AM CST is a good choice because of the various time zone implications.
The next thing to think about is the subject line. This is one element where you should spend the most time. If you’re like me, you can pretty much tell by the subject line if you’re going to open the email. And if don’t like the first couple of lines in your email previewer, you’re probably going to hit the delete key – regardless of the time and day you received the email.
The good news is that there’s a lot of help in this area. The tool I’d recommend you try is called the Email Subject Line Grader created by Net Atlantic. If you type in the heading that I used for this blog post, you’ll see that it rated 100%. If you change it slightly to “What’s the best day to send an email?” you’ll find that the algorithm causes the rating to drop to 89%. The subtle difference there is that more people will relate to sending multiple emails, versus sending only a single email. The link for that subject line grader is: http://emailsubjectlinegrader.com/.
The next element has to do with the grammar and punctuation within the body of the text. That’s easily checked by turning on your email’s spelling and grammar checker, or using Word to design the body of the text.
Email size is another important element. According to Constant Contact, they’ve found that the best length for your email is approximately 20 lines of text. That equates roughly to 200 words. Their data show that this email size results in the best email click-through rates for most industries. However, they go on to say that the better answer might be “as long as it needs to be.”
As we look at the various Behavior Styles you’ll encounter, you’re probably going to be at the upper end of a “Doer’s” patience with anything longer than 200 words. You’ll find that this personality type likes bulleted emails the best. For the ‘Talker’ behavior style, they’re going to like multiple paragraphs, and lots of background. The ‘Thinker’ is going to want reference resources or attachments, and the ‘Guardian’ is going to prefer a politely warm yet formal email. You can get an infographic that goes into much more depth on behavior styles at https://www.bakercommunications.com/behavior-styles-info/.
Hopefully, this will help you in composing emails to your clients. For those ‘Thinkers’ that are reading this, here are some of the references and resources used:
