Guess what – it works!  The fact is, with a massive increase in mobile email and better spam filtering, many top executives prepare for their Monday morning on Sunday evening.  Interestingly, emails sent on a Sunday evening can get much more attention than they would during the week.

Business-to-business communication has often been rumoured to work best sent sometime between Wednesday morning and Thursday afternoon, which isn’t necessarily the best time to catch the attention of a top performer within a business.  At this stage of the week, they are already well through their plans, dealing with the multitude of inbound communication and filtering out as many non-essential emails as they can.

If you do decide to market on a Sunday afternoon or evening, make it look deliberate.  Call it your “Sunday Digest” so it doesn’t appear as a marketing error.  Ensure the tone of your copy is more relaxed and reflective as opposed to the punchy and forthright content you would send mid-week.  Ensure that the articles are short and thought provoking and above all give the reader something to add to their to-do list for the following week that involves your company!

This advice flies in the face of traditional email marketing advice, which is probably why this sweet spot of attention still remains. Doing what everyone else does is the sure-fire way of reducing the odds of it getting the attention it deserves.
 

In my recent travels, I have pigeonholed Irish companies into 3 compartments:

1. Those looking to the Internet to help save their business as the phones stopped ringing in October 08.  Typically, this type of business needs a panic solution in a desperate attempt to try and breathe life into their sales funnel.

2. Businesses that need to improve their marketing as they now realise that big budget, off-line marketing rarely moves a potential client to take affirmative action and pick up the phone to talk to them.

3. Organisations that are ever expanding simply because they have aligned their entire business to work on the web.  They recognise that this is where potential clients check out what others think of their product or service and the web is where potential customers take affirmative action and make contact.  This can be a charity, IT solutions provider, an architect or even a restaurant.

Moving from a 1 or 2 business to a category 3 business is not a matter of money, it is a change of heart coupled with understanding and recognition that change is never easy, but always for the best.