Michael Katz's E-Newsletter On E-Newsletters
January 20, 2006
Issue #144
Hit 'Em Where They Ain't
"I keep my eyes clear and I hit 'em where
they ain't."
"Wee Willie" Keeler
Hall of Fame Baseball Player (1872–1923)
Back in the days when I had a job, I did a fair
amount of hiring. Ours was a large,
decentralized
company, and as the hiring manager for an open
position, I would do everything from writing the job
description to placing the ad to interviewing the
candidates.
(Interestingly, one of my first, "This Internet thing is
going to change the world" epiphanies came while
trying to fill a position. I spent $3,500 to place a
single help wanted ad in The Sunday Boston Globe,
and $150 to run the same ad on Monster.com. Both
ads yielded the same number of qualified responses.
I decided right there to never again place a help
wanted ad in a newspaper.)
In any case, the first few days after an ad ran,
I'd
be inundated with resumes. Sometimes, if it
was a
particularly attractive job, I'd have so much paper in
my office that it looked like there had been a collision
between a Staples truck and a carload of IRS
auditors.
As you can imagine, my first objective in these
situations was to get rid of as many resumes as
possible, and winnow the pile down to a manageable
six or seven good choices. The fact is, with a couple
of hundred options on my desk, if your resume didn't
have every qualification I was looking for, I tossed it
like a day old muffin (or whatever). Average time
spent per resume? Maybe 15 seconds each.
One thing I eventually noticed however, was that
resumes which dribbled in towards the end of the
week got more of my attention. With my office
once
again clean, and most of the sorting work now behind
me, I'd give a much closer look to these late
arrivals. Not consciously, but simply because my
orientation had shifted from "weed out" to "weed in."
When it comes to determining the best day and time
to send your E-Newsletter, the same logic applies.
In other words, the answer lies in figuring out
when
your recipients are most likely to not be trying
to
weed you out.
And with that in mind, I offer the following
recommendations:
- Stay away from early morning. The
first
thing your readers do when they arrive at the office
is check e-mail. Since most of them spend more time
away from their computers overnight than during any
other period, it stands to reason that the biggest
backlog — and therefore, the greatest
tendency to
delete all but the most critical — will occur
when
they
first check in the morning. We don't want our
newsletters in this pile. For the same reason, I
wouldn't send a newsletter after about 4PM, since
for anybody who doesn't get to it today, 4PM turns
into tomorrow morning.
-
Stay away from Mondays (or Tuesdays after a
long
weekend). As with early morning, it all backs
up
over the weekend (if your audience is made up of
businesspeople), and we need to steer clear. In
fact, I avoid the first day after the weekend entirely,
since it tends to be a day when people are
scrambling and eager to clear the decks of anything
"unnecessary."
-
Pay attention to time zones. If most of your
important readers (i.e. the ones who are most likely
to become clients) are in the same location as you,
it's easy. If however, they're spread out all over the
country or world, you may have to split the
difference a bit to minimize the overnight problem.
See if you can find a time of day that is between
9AM and 4PM for most readers.
-
Hit 'em where they ain't. There have been
— and
continue to be — all kinds of studies which
attempt
to isolate the best day/time to send. Don't take
these at face value however, since different
companies have different audiences and different
objectives, and what works "in general" may not
apply to you.
For me, as
somebody sending
a "thought piece" — as opposed to an e-mail
looking
for an immediate response or purchase — I
look for
the day and time where I think my readers are ready
to take a little break from their working day and think
about something else. In my case, mid-morning on
Friday
seems to be about right. Your readers may
be different however, so give some thought to who
they are and when they will be most inclined to hear
your message.
Bottom Line: With E-Newsletters, content is
what
matters most. If you don't have that taken care of,
there is no best day/time to send. That said,
you'll
increase your chances of avoiding the dreaded delete
key if you take into account when your readers are
least interested in throwing everything (including
you) overboard.
The PENGUINscore Spotlight
The PENGUINscore is an easy (and did I mention,
free?) tool for improving your business
communications. You can read more about it here.
The purpose of the PENGUINscore Spotlight
is to
highlight one aspect of this newsletter each time I
publish, as an example of how to put this
approach
into practice.
This week, I bring your attention to the third
attribute, "N," for "Narrow."
Narrow topics are easy to write and easy to
understand. They don't tend to be fancy
(i.e. "When's the best day/time to publish an
E-Newsletter?"), but they are usually very tactical,
and
as such, give readers ideas that they can implement
immediately.
It's fine to cover "big issues" in your newsletter.
Just make sure you're also throwing readers a steady
stream of useful, narrow, on the ground information
they can use today!
How about you? What's your PENGUINscore?
About Blue Penguin Development, Inc.
Blue Penguin Development helps professional service firms get clients,
by showing them how to strengthen relationships with the people they already know.
I specialize in the development of electronic newsletters.
Click here for an overview of my services.
|
