From the Dept. of Dumb Ideas: Send Emails on Sundays
Axios HQ’s email open rate study reveals a common mistake by number crunchers.
With employee engagement slipping and half of all workers looking for a new job, Axios HQ has come up with an unusual solution — send them emails on Sundays.
“Many of the ‘best send’ windows — at organizations of all sizes — land on Sunday afternoons,” the AI-powered messaging platform says in a study of 8.7 million internal communication emails.
Kris Kristofferson once sang, “There’s something in a Sunday makes a body feel alone.”
If Kris had gotten a Sunday email about the new security badge he needed to get into the office, then he really would be “wishing, Lord, that I was stoned,” as the song goes.
The Axios HQ study touches on a frustrating challenge for internal communicators: Getting employees to read and understand key messages. Hence our preoccupation with the best time to get the most readers for an email, for better or worse the most widely used internal communications channel.
By focusing on a single statistic, Axios HQ would likely worsen the problems organizations are facing managing workers, all in the name of opening more emails. The company, which prides itself on its analytical approach, also illustrates a common mistake by number crunchers. Data without common sense can be worse than no data at all.
Feeling telepressure
Employee engagement in the U.S. fell to 32% in 2022, the lowest level since 2014, when it was 31%, according to Gallup. Meanwhile, many desk workers are feeling fried, with 41% saying they “feel burned out at work,” according to a report this year by Future Forum, a research consortium that includes messaging app Slack. Any wonder that this year half of all workers are looking for a different job, the highest level since 2015, Gallup found.
Sunday afternoon work emails won’t help. Two researchers in 2015 coined the term “telepressure” to describe employees’ preoccupation with and urge to respond quickly to work-related electronic messages.
“An ‘always-on’ culture with high expectations to monitor and respond to emails during non-work time may prevent employees from ever fully disengaging from work, leading to chronic stress and emotional exhaustion,” according to 2016 study by a trio of researchers published in Science Daily.
And that was all before the pandemic.
Responding to work emails outside of regular business hours also affects families, increasing conflicts at home, according to a 2022 study published in Occupational Health Science.
And, no surprise, most employees don’t like it. More than 60% of employees say it’s very important for them to work for an organization that respects the boundaries between work and not working, according to the 2023 Work in America Survey by the American Psychological Association. Another 34% say it’s somewhat important.
Day of rest?
The company doesn’t address these concerns. Instead, it sheepishly says in the report, “We also recognize, for some organizations, sending updates outside of normal working hours may feel like an infringement on employee time or team culture.”
Ya think?
Axios HQ likes to boast that its platform is powered by artificial intelligence, but the report demonstrates one of AI’s flaws. Blindly following data can lead to blunders.
Axios HQ found that work emails sent on Sundays have an average open rate of 94% between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. The rate slips to 86% between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.
High open rates on Sunday are likely due to how unusual those emails are. Receiving one, most employees’ instinctive response would be, “Holy crap! They’re emailing me on Sunday?” or “Uh-oh. This can’t be good.” Just 2% of the emails studied were sent over the weekend.
Monday is the best workday to send a work email, the study finds. The best time is from 3 to 6 a.m., when employees are sleeping except for zealots dedicated to early-morning workouts.
While the results are interesting, it’s no substitute to studying the performance of your own internal emails, a common feature of newsletter tools.
If Sunday’s the best day to send an internal comms email, what does Axios HQ think is the worst day?
Saturday, when the open rate is just 31%.
Slackers!
Tom Corfman is a lawyer and senior consultant with Ragan Consulting Group who says, “In writing, don’t overdo the bullets.” He leads the company’s Build Better Writers program.
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