Do you ever sleep?

It’s 3am and you just clicked “Send”

When emailing people outside of our company, clicking send at midnight is questionable. Common advice is to save the email as a draft, and send it in the morning. Except we are prone to distraction. Even if we plan to send an email the next day, we’ll probably forget.

Imagine this scenario.

It’s 11:47pm and we’re catching up on email. We missed an email from a prospective client earlier, but we feel awkward hitting send at 11:47pm. So we save it as a draft, telling ourselves we’ll send it in the morning.

The next morning as we’re walking into the office, our manager grabs us as at the door. There’s a critical situation. The project we were working on has a major bug. Our biggest client is about to drop. So we hustle to solve the problem, doing everything possible to avoid this catastrophe.

Two days later, the problem is solved. BUT OH!!! WE JUST REMEMBERED WE HAD THAT EMAIL IN DRAFT!!

Except now it’s too late.

Since we saved the late-night email in draft, we lost a prospective client.

We can avoid this mistake entirely by leveraging technology to schedule emails for the next morning. With an email scheduling tool (like Boomerang, Newton Mail, or simply selecting ‘delay delivery’ under your Outlook OPTIONS tab (see image below)), we can write emails at 11:47pm – or whenever we’re most productive – and then schedule them to send at any hour the next morning. All with the click of a button.

This brings up yet another interesting question: What’s the point of sending emails at night, anyway? Aren’t people too busy to check their email at night?

Some people are more likely to read emails at night.

A study by Experian showed the highest email open rates were between 8pm and 11:59pm, at 21.7%. Whereas the second highest open rate was between 12am and 4am, at 17.6%:

This validates that people will open emails late at night, often more frequently than they open emails during the day.

In conclusion, if you’re writing emails in the middle of the night, schedule to send them early morning.

Happy Tuesday & Happy Selling!
Kevin