I belong to a LinkedIn group titled ‘Internal Communications Best Practices’. I know – there’s no such thing as best practice, don’t blame me I didn’t title the damned thing!
There’s a discussion on the group just now prompted by someone who asks ‘Best time to send out newsletters?’. Putting aside the fact that someone in internal comms is having worrying difficulty in constructing a sentence just for a moment, let’s take a look at some of the responses received so far.
The optimum time to rollout an email newsletter is after 10:00 am and before 3:00 pm. The reason is based on the office timings and the core business activities.
I’m responsible for my company internal newsletter. It comes out on Fridays at 11. It includes articles across events happened in the week, but also short news and a calendar for upcoming events.
I am responsible for fortnight staff e-newsletter, mine goes out on Thursdays at 11 am…I know it is bit tricky to think when is the good time. I didn’t choose Monday because people may have other priorities at the start of the week and I didn’t choose Friday as quite a few people normally take the day off and stuff on Friday or trying to finish off urgent stuff…..but I really can’t vouch on it if it has made any difference, my readership analytics has remained about 45% and my system can track people who read the newsletter and mostly they are the same people who read them every time anyway !!
I currently send out an e-newsletter on the 1st and 3rd Friday of every month that captures all of our successes and news stories. It’s usually sent around noon. All of this information is then collated into a hardcopy at the end of the month to support our remote colleagues that can’t access email as easily. I’m hoping to start sending a Monday morning ‘in the loop’ newsletter soon – it will be very short and sweet, but contain an outline of the activities that are happening in each office that week so colleagues feel in the know.
At my previous organisation, our email newsletter was sent at 11am on a Wednesday each week.
Is it just me or does this all seem rather odd? Surely the time to send news is when you’ve got news to send, isn’t it? Aside from the fact that sending something on a fixed date and time each week forces you to come up with something to say, regardless of its usefulness or otherwise, A challenge with doing things so regularly is that people often dial it out, and don’t engage with what you are sharing so well.
One of the correspondents notes that it’s always the same people who read the stuff anyway. That makes me think, why not ask those who read the news why they read it, and maybe ask those who don’t why they currently don’t and what might change that too?
Isn’t it more engaging for the reader and more liberating for the sender to be driven by the need to share important and useful stuff rather than the need to send and receive at 11am on a Wednesday?