Best Time of Day to Send Email
The most fleeting joy in this world is the sending of an important email, as it is inevitably replaced by the anxiety of waiting for a response. If you want a quick response to your email, send it in the morning. Brendan Greenlee, Data Scientist at email scheduling company Boomerang , further explains in an email to Lifehacker:
The best time to send someone an email is at the start of the work day, as people tend to view emails in a last-in-first-out (LIFO) method, first reading and responding to messages at the top of their inbox. A Boomerang study found that people tend to write the most emails on weekday mornings until noon.
If your email reaches the recipient’s inbox between 7 AM and 9 AM, it will most likely be one of the first emails they see before this key time frame, when they will most likely write emails and respond.
Boomerang’s results (taken from a database of over 1 million public emails) are in line with the results of a Yahoo Labs / University of Southern California study that analyzed over 16 billion emails. A Yahoo study found that people respond to emails faster from 8 am to noon (and early in the week).
Sending outside of this time can bury your email in the morning hustle and bustle and then ignore it for several days, despite your recipient’s best intentions. So whenever you send an email, if you want to prioritize a quick response, use a tool like Boomerang or CloudHQ’s Schedule Email to schedule it to arrive in the morning – or whenever you find that your coworkers usually respond to their emails.