• by Jess Nelson , October 7, 2015

When is the best time for email marketers to send out messages? A new study by USC Viterbi School of Engineering finds that email response varies by age, platform and timing.

The study was conducted by doctoral student Farshad Kooti and associate professor Kristina Lerman and presented at the World Wide Web Conference in a paper entitled “Evolutions of Conversations in the Age of Email Overload.”

Response time greatly differs by platform and age demographics. Teenagers have the fastest response time with an average of 13 minutes, while people over the age of 50 take an average of 47 minutes to respond.  Responses from a laptop will take almost twice as long as responses from a mobile device.

90% of respondents say they will respond within two days to any email they plan to engage with, while half of respondents will reply within an hour.

The study also states there is a correlation between increased email loads and engagement rates. Younger email users will send shorter responses to deal with the influx of messages in their inbox, while older email users will simply respond to fewer messages.

The vast majority of email responses are short, with only 30% of emails containing more than 100 words. More than half of all email replies are less than 43 words; weekends and evenings receive the shortest replies.

So what does this mean for email marketers? Should marketers start sending all emails during weekday mornings?

Not unless they don’t any other type of customer data available.

Otherwise, marketers should be thinking about send time optimization as an important tool for their email marketing campaigns.

As evident by the USC study, every consumer is different and email engagement varies by various factors. Send time optimization pinpoints the best time to send an email to a customer based on their previous interactions and behavior.

Sending the right message, at the right time, can increase email marketing ROI by up to 25% according to a recent study by data solutions provider Return Path.

Data-driven marketers who utilize email segmentation can increase global email opens rates by 13.07% and clicks by 51.92%, according to a recent MailChimp study.