Timing
When to send emails. Also, when should I send *this* email? And, 7 other things worth your time.
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“Me and Brandon Antonie both seen it ... Once I noticed the silver Nissan, I backed up and blocked him in. I called 911 and they answered and said we have an officer minutes away. Before I could hang up the phone the officer was there.”
—Dion Merrick, a sanitation worker in Louisiana who, with his coworker Antonie, were credited with saving a kidnapped 10-year-old girl. The car had been identified in an Amber Alert.
Sunday evening
Let’s finish this week’s emails by finishing that thing about emails.
Recently, we explored how starting your emails with one specific word, or closing them with a simple three-word phrase, makes people more likely to reply to them.
Those reports were based on a study of 300,000 emails. But a much larger study examined hundreds of millions of emails (that’s what I call scale!), and came up with another important piece of the puzzle.
The big takeaway this time is simple: Send your emails at a time when fewer other people are sending them.
Statistically, that means your sweet spot is likely Sunday evenings.
"The closest to a 1:1 relationship where you receive one reply to every outgoing email you send is Sunday," wrote Elise Musumano at Yesware, the email application company that conducted the study.
Moreover, emails sent in the early morning or the early evening--more specifically, between 6 and 7 a.m., or around 8 p.m.--had very solid reply rates: around 45 percent.
That same study found that there's really no difference in terms of response rates during the week: They're all uniform—and thus uniformly inferior to weekend email send-and-response rates.
Hmmm. I just wrote about a study of hundreds of millions of emails that says you should send emails on Sunday evening.
What’s the one time I’ve never sent one of these newsletters? Sunday evening.
I’ll have to file that away. Have a great weekend.
7 other things worth your time
A commonly used asthma treatment appears to reduce the need for hospitalizations as well as recovery time for COVID-19 patients if given within seven days of symptoms appearing, researchers at the University of Oxford said on Tuesday. Also, the world’s second-oldest person, a 116-year-old nun in France, beat the disease. (Reuters, Time)
Wear two masks and make sure they fit, says CDC. Related: maskne is a thing now. Unrelated: the Biden administration says it has a deal for another 200 million vaccine doses and will have 600 million by end of summer. (Reuters, CBS Local, NBC News)
The first coed Marine Corps boot camp at San Diego started this week. (Marines at Parris Island have been training coed for a year now; this is an expansion.) The Marines were the last U.S. military service to integrate training like this. (Military.com)
Whitney Wolfe Herd, 31, founder of Bumble, became the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire yesterday, after she simultaneously became the youngest woman ever to take a company public in the United States. (Forbes)
The House managers wrapped up their case in the impeachment trial yesterday; former President Trump’s defense begins tomorrow. Also, Officer Eugene Goodman and other police will receive the Congressional Gold Medal for their actions on Jan. 6. (NYT)
Home prices are through the roof: up 14.9 percent in general, and multiples of that in some areas of the northeast compared to a year ago. In Bozeman, Montana, prices are up 50 percent from this time in 2020. In some cases, people are buying expensive homes without doing home inspections or due diligence—and regretting it. (Bloomberg, CityLab, WSJ)
An 8-year-old boy called out NPR for not having enough stories about dinosaurs on its program, All Things Considered, which he listens to with his mom in the car. NPR’s response? They searched transcripts for all 50 years of the show and found the word “dinosaur” appeared 294 times, versus “senator,” which came in 20,447 times. So, they brought the child on the show and let him interview a paleontologist. (NPR)
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I wonder if maybe people are more receptive to emails on Sunday because they are less busy?
On another note if former President Trump gets off on his impeachment is it possible for former President Clinton to have his impeachment repealed? Because if Trump didn't do anything wrong that what Clinton did is not even a blip on the radar by comparison.
Interesting that early morning and late evening emails get the best response. Wondering if it is because it is at the very beginning and then at the end of some people’s workdays. Once a person has gone through the email traffic-the regular “work”emails, these may seem more important and worthy of a direct response. And re the amber alert success, I think it would be good to advertise what people can do when the amber alert comes on. I think people feel powerless unless given a protocol or a way to actually help in a situation.