Is your organization looking to generate more interest and responses from newsletters and other email publications? Has your property considered how the time of day emails are distributed can affect the overall response/acceptance rate?

MediaPost recently featured a great article written by Morgan Stewart on the “Best Time of Day” to send emails. The article featured some strong points with key implications for sports marketers:

When is the best time of day to distribute newsletters?

Arriving Early Morning – Many users start their day sorting through their email inboxes. Mornings allow email users to spend uninterrupted time in their inbox. During this time, users usually have a single episode of a considerable amount of time to check their inboxes.

Because there are fewer interruptions and more continuous time spent in the email inbox, mornings are a more logical choice for the delivery of newsletters and long copy emails that require more time for the subscriber to read.

When is the best time of day to send promotional offers?

Arrive Early Afternoon – During the afternoon, consumers have more email episodes, but these episodes are shorter in duration. Between 2pm and 3pm, users are likely to have five (5) individual episodes of 2-3 minutes apiece.

Because consumers during the afternoon are often in a “quick-hit” mode, properties should use the afternoon periods to send out promotions and invitations.

Stewart found through research that email makes up between 30% and 35% of the average user’s media exposure between the hours of 8am and 3pm. This figure drops off during the late afternoon and early evening, only to peak again in the late evening, between 8pm and 9pm.

While the focus of this column was to provide some general insights on email consumption habits, each organization should test the delivery of their distribution methods to ultimately determine what time/style work best to drive fan/consumer response.