Barely a week goes by without a new report emerging on the topic of when the best time is to send out an email.

Is there a day of the week, a time of day when you get the best response?

The whole argument is based around the notion that people do notice when an email comes in and that this influences their response.

If I take myself as a sample of one, yes I am a little more trigger happy on a Monday morning, as I tend to have emails in the in-box which have arrived since I closed the machine down at 5pm on Friday.  And since most of my customers don’t write to me over the weekend, I have the feeling that what is in the in-box is rubbish.

But for the rest of the week, I think I take everything as equal.  I know my Australian clients are liable to write overnight (from my perspective in the UK).  And I know that for reasons that have never become clear to me, some of our clients work until 7 in the evening – or even later.

So I am really not sure that timing of incoming emails makes a difference to me at work.

As for my home email, if I wake up early I do sometimes take a peek before I go to work.  Otherwise I generally have a look when I get home in the evening.

But despite my survey of one, we have retained in this office a view that Friday afternoon is no good for emailing.   But by a curious anomaly in the way we work, (i.e. a cock up) we have actually been advertising products that a different department of Hamilton House has available to sell on Friday afternoon (because these adverts have been held back while we have sent out our clients adverts through the week).

And would you believe it, we’ve been getting terrific sales.

So, what do we conclude?   Quite probably that unless you have clear evidence that emails sent out at a particular time to a particular audience do better or worse than others, don’t follow guidance as to when is the best time.

Not least because everyone else will be following that guidance, and so that time (whenever it is) will start to become the moment everyone sends out emails.

Hamilton House can distribute your emails for you, and also has available a state of the art program for transmitting emails, if you want to do it yourself.  Do give us a call if you want to know more.