• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, May 22, 2020

Don’t bother emailing content over the weekend — Saturday and Sunday are the worst possible days, according to 2020 B2B Content Consumption And Demand, a study by NetLine, provider of a B2B buyer engagement platform. 

The best time to send is midweek: Tuesday and Wednesday make up half of all content consumption days. And if you want to reach C-level types, Tuesday is the best day — at 10 AM EST, to be precise. The next best times are at 12 PM EST, 9 a.m. EST and 4 PM EST.

Monday and Thursday are the next-best days for sending content to anyone. Friday is relatively weak.

The report says 2020, but it is based on patterns observed by NetLine in 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak. The company delivered 16 petabytes of content last year.

Among other things, it determined that engagement numbers slipped in nearly every channel except email.

It also found that the 50 most active days for content consumption occurred in the second half of the year in 2019. Twelve of them were in November, including the top three. 

Executives increased their secondary content requests by 2% in 2019, YoY.

What do people want to read? Here are the top 10 content types by request: 

• eBook
• White Paper
• Guide
• eGuide
• Tips and Tricks Guide
• Report
• Cheat Sheet
• On-Demand Webinar
• Subscription
• Book Excerpt 

And here are the best words to include in titles and subject lines aimed at executives:

• Enterprise Security
• Talent Management 
• CFO
• Financial Risk 
• Leadership Advice 

Why these terms?

“In 2019, Executives were looking for solid advice on how to secure their data (customer and company), improve their HR and recruitment practices, become more in-sync with their financial departments, and, as always, become more familiar with the pricing requests of potential vendor partners,” the study notes.  

C-level execs held the #1 spot for content consumption. But people demanding human resources-related content took up the second, third and fourth slots, becoming the most active audience. IT slipped behind them.

Here’s one more finding — that mobile sessions increased by 10%, although most content is still consumed on desktop. 

“Whether they’re scrolling through Instagram or waiting on an important email, our phones are nearly always on our person,” the study notes.