Tuesday most popular day for direct mail delivery
Howard Lake | 4 October 2004 | News
Research by Pitney Bowes suggests that direct marketers across many industries prefer their direct mail to arrive on a Tuesday.
Pitney Bowes questioned marketers from the top 1,000 UK companies and found that 51% of them believed that Tuesday was the most effective day on which their direct mail should arrive. The next most popular arrival day was Wednesday at 17%. Thursday and Saturday were equal third with 9%, and Monday and Friday in joint last place with 7%.
The survey respondents represented many different industry sectors, including financial, retail, utilities, and travel, although not the charity/fundraising sector.
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Malcolm Bruce, director for national posts at Pitney Bowes, offered some suggestions as to why there was such a strong concensus on choosing Tuesday. Monday is too early in the week because people are still dealing with their in-tray and gearing up for work after the weekend. Friday is too late because it is nearly the weekend, so it is easy to put off opening direct mail, and so on.
Interestingly, anecdotal evidence suggests that e-mail newsletters achieve a higher open and response rate if they are delivered on Tuesdays. For this reason, apart from some occasional testing of other days of the week, UK Fundraising News, our free fortnightly e-mail newsletter, has always been published on a Tuesday.
If you want to get really clever, you can test and discover the best time of day on a Tuesday for an e-mail campaign to arrive. With paper-based direct mail, there isn’t of course that option.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.