Want Your Email to Be Read? Send It on Sunday

It’s always a bit of a crap shoot when you send an email. With so many forms of communication today, you’re never really sure whether your note will be opened or read?

In day-to-day life, that’s an inconvenience. In the working world, it could have a bigger impact. But a new study shows when your odds of that work email being opened and read are the highest.

Axios HQ says the best time to send an internal communication is on a Sunday afternoon, between the hours of 3:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. EST. Doing so results in an average open rate of 94%. (Emails sent on Sunday between 6:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. are opened 86% of the time.)

If not Sunday, Monday is your best bet, with an overall open rate averaging 54%. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are your next-best option, with average open rates of 52%. Thursday drops to 47% and Friday shows a slight gain, averaging 49%, perhaps as people do one last glance before heading out.

Saturday? As you might expect, that’s the worst day to try to send an email to a colleague, with an average open rate of just 31%. And if you’re hoping for an answer between 6:00 a.m. and noon on a Saturday, good luck. Open rates there are a mere 21%.

So what makes Sunday so special? Axios theorizes there are fewer distractions and work priorities that stand in the way of your recipient reading your email. Another advantage of a Sunday email? It’s at or near the top of the unread stack when employees show up for work on Monday.

To deduce the most-read periods, Axios analyzed the open rates of 8.7 million emails sent through its platform over a 14-month period. The data was taken from 215 organizations with employee counts from less than 50 to global organizations. Most were U.S. based.

“You can have the most essential messages in the world, but if you don’t send them at a time when employees or stakeholders can read, absorb and act on them, you’re stunting everyone’s potential — and costing the organization productivity, time, and money along the way,” Axios wrote.

While younger workers might prefer doing most of their communication via texting or DMs on social media, when it comes to work nearly three-quarters of employees say they prefer their leaders send vital internal updates via email, ensuring it remains a vital communication method.

There is one exception to the Sunday open rate rule. Large organizations, with between 2,500 and 9,999 employees, had lower open rates overall, in part due to the siloing of those companies. In that instance, emails sent on Wednesdays between 9:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. EST had the highest open rate, coming in at 73%. Monday and Tuesday sends between 9 and noon did nearly as well, with a 70% open rate.

(Enterprise organizations, with 10,000 or more employees, saw Sunday evening as the best time to send, however)

Obviously, the optimal periods vary from company to company and industry to industry. And Axios says knowing your employees and coworkers and how they operate is key to getting your email read.

“Successful sends come from studying your audience — knowing when they are at their desks, what days are heavy with meetings, and if some might only be able to check email before or after they join an assembly line,” it said. “All that data will help you find the best day and time to send essential internal communications.”

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.