#5 of 7 Reasons to Use Delay Delivery: Reduces chances of your email being missed

Using Delay Delivery helps to avoid your message getting lost in the 'morning purge' by your recipients. If you send a message ‘after hours’ it could be sitting in your recipient’s inbox along with dozens of other messages when they check their inbox in the morning. Amongst these will be a host of spam and other low priority messages that will have the recipient in a 'delete' or 'purge' frame of mind – there's a risk your message could be lost in this process!

Recent research also shows that a wide variety of factors to consider to maximise your chances of achieving the desired outcome for your message. The best time to send email is when send volumes are lowest – weekends, early mornings, and evenings. People are most responsive in the early morning or later in the evening. If you’re having a hard time getting in touch with someone, try sending emails that arrive between 6am and 7am, or around 8pm.

Although it contradicts point 3 above about your professionalism, it seems that Sundays are a sweet spot for email replies with a reply rate of 52%. The reason is that there is less competition for attention in the inbox when you send a message on a Sunday. There was a research piece done by the North Sydney City Council that showed one business in their area had maximum email volumes at 8:30pm on a Sunday night. It appears that this was because that was the time the CEO was addressing his email. The next level of executives cottoned onto this and so they started doing email at that time because they were able to get the CEO’s attention. And so on it cascaded down the ranks in the organisation!

Having said all that, there may be people you correspond with for whom a Sunday message is not inappropriate and something to be taken advantage of.

Click here to see the full White Paper on these 7 Reasons to Use Delay Delivery for Your Outgoing Email or click here if you would like the one page version