I’d like to place a bet that at some point in your career as an HR and communications professional you have searched this in Google. You also may have spent so much time researching best practices on when to send employee communications that there is a policy at your organization on when mass corporate emails are to be sent to employees. This is typically in the morning between Tuesday and Thursday to help ensure that employees are reached at the optimal time determined by many email marketers in the field.
I’d challenge you test against that “optimal time” for sending employee communications. We make an effort to do that with every communication we send, and many of the results have shocked and surprised us. We have seen some of our best email performance (for more on email performance and what metrics to track click here) come on Saturday mornings and Sunday evenings, which has been labeled notoriously bad in the field. We have also seen Tuesday mornings work well, consistent with best practice theories as well. With all of the data that we have collected and research performed, one of our biggest findings is that every employee population is different and has varying communication needs.
Success of employee communications is conditional on understanding your employees, their schedule and your unique office culture. By sending employee emails at varying days and times as part of an experiment, you can effectively narrow down what works best for your population and what doesn’t in comparison.
As you work towards creating a more effective communications plan for your benefits, ask yourself the following questions.
- Do you know how many people are reading your emails?
If you don’t, consider keeping track of employee email open and click rates to get a more accurate idea of what your baseline is for communication effectiveness. Learn more about this in a previous post. - Have you ever tried sending your emails at a different time?
You will gain valuable insight by learning about and tracking what days and times are effective and not for employee communications at your organization. - Do you consider your office culture when picking communication times?
Every office is different. Think about and ask a variety of colleagues about how your company’s office culture is unique. This can greatly influence how employees perceive and react to corporate communications.
Optimizing the day of the week and time you send your benefit communications can lead to an enormous lift in enrollment and usage over time. It is key for you to remember that every employee population is different, just because a particular day and time work for one population doesn’t mean they will work for all of them. If you want to get even more advanced and sophisticated try segmenting your employees based on age or job function as well. Testing different days and times for different age groups. Remember, there is no such thing as a bad test if you treat every test as an opportunity to learn something new.
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