When to send e-mail

I am going to be sending out various messages soon calling for action, and was thinking about when to send them.

When I was sending out the newsletters, I always tried to send them out between Tuesday and Thursday. My reasoning was that Monday has people catching up on things, and Friday has them trying to get everything caught up, and so the newsletter had a better chance of being read between then.

The obvious flaw with that reasoning is that if we did a good job of getting caught up on Friday, Monday shouldn't be so bad. People shouldn't be sending a lot of business mail over the weekend (though it's weird how often they do). I would also plan on sending the newsletter out around 2 in the afternoon - after lunch, but before people would be getting ready to leave for the day.

I am delighted to find that the internet backs me up:

http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/09/04/best-time-to-send-email-campaign

Of course, if everyone uses the same reasoning, the glut of newsletters may cause a panicked delete, so it can backfire.

There were some things I was not expecting:

https://customer.io/blog/timing-week-day-email-sending-schedule.html

I had no idea people hated Tuesdays. You may think that it's Mondays that you hate, but really, you still have a weekend boost going into Monday, and it lifts you up. By Tuesday that is gone, but it's still the right time to send e-mail.

Tomorrow is President's Day, so many people should have a sizable boost this this Tuesday, but this week it might be better to send on Wednesday, or maybe even wait until next week.

(I am probably just going to go with Wednesday.)