商务英语：发邮件也要看准时间

2012-05-11 00:00:00来源：网络

　　For the past 18 months or so, I"ve been sending a monthly email out to a list of a few thousand people (who voluntarily gave me their addresses!) My open rate is somewhere between 35 percent and 44 percent.

　　在过去的18个里，我每个月给那些自愿给我邮件地址的人发邮件，大概每月要发几千封邮件。这些邮件的打开率大概在35%到44%之间。

　　This past month, I had a realization: the highest open rates tended to occur during the months that I sent the email on a Sunday afternoon.

　　上个月我发现：在我发送邮件的几个月里，在周日下午发送出的邮件是打开率最高的。

　　This did not seem intuitiveto me. Indeed, I'd actually avoided sending the email on weekends because I thought it would lower the open rate. Most of us try to be places other than our desks on Sundays, and doing things that don't involve email.

　　一开始我并没有想过会是这样的结果。事实上，我会避免在周末发送邮件，因为我认为周末的邮件阅读率不会高。星期天大多数人都不会选择待在书桌前办公，而是去做些其他的事情，当然不包括查看邮件。

　　But after talking with Alex Moore, CEO of Baydin, an email management service, I started to think about what was going on. Moore told me that emails sent from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. are about three times more likely to be opened than emails sent at 4 p.m.

　　但是在和电子邮件管理服务公司Baydin的行政总裁Alex Moore谈过之后，我开始思考到底发生了什么事。Moore 告诉我，早晨6-7点发出的电子邮件，得到阅读的可能性是下午4点发出的邮件的三倍以上。

　　Many of us know that we should "never check email in the morning". Yet we do. We show upat our workplaces, grab our coffee, and start pecking away at our inboxes, starting with the first unopened emails -- those sent at 6 a.m. or so. Any email sent then is "toward the top of the pile," says Moore, so it gets read.

　　许多人都知道这句话“绝对不要在早晨查看电子邮件”。但事实上我们一直都在这么做。我们出现在工作的地方，手拿咖啡杯，开始查看收件箱，点开第一封没打开的邮件——那些早晨6点左右发送的邮件。Moore说，在这个时间发送的任何邮件都有可能“排在未读邮件列表的前列”，因此这些邮件更有可能被阅读。

　　By the end of the day, though, any given email gets buried in an avalancheof other emails. People are triagingand trying to get out the door and anything marginalor not related to the task at hand will just get deleted or ignored. That's why morning emails work so well.

　　而在一天结束的时候，任何邮件都将被其他邮件给沉下去。人们会权衡轻重，把那些不重要的、或与当前任务无关的邮件删除或忽略。这就是为什么早晨发邮件会很有效的原因了。

　　Which makes sense -- but doesn't explain what I was finding. Why was Sunday afternoon working so well for me?

　　这种说法有一定的道理，但还是不能解释我的发现，那就是为什么周日下午发送邮件会效果特别好呢？

　　It turns out that in the smartphone era, many people do check email on Sundays. Any resolveto stay out of the inbox ends with Saturday. Sitting in the bleachersat a soccer game, or waiting for a game to come on, or putteringaround the house, they're somewhat bored, and willing to do something that seems semi-productive. Since not too many messages come in on Sunday, yours might get read. And as for people who don't check email on Sunday? A 4 p.m. Sunday email looks a lot like a 6 a.m. Monday email from that perspective. They're both at the top of the pile.

　　原因应该是：在智能手机的时代，许多人会在星期天查看邮件。任何远离电子邮件的措施，在星期六就结束了。坐在看台上，等待足球赛开始，或者在屋子里闲逛，人们有时候会感到无聊，就想做点有意义的事情。既然星期天没有太多的新消息，那么你的邮件就很有可能被打开阅读了。对于在星期天不看邮件的人来说，从某种角度来看，星期天下午4点发的邮件看起来很像星期一早晨6点发出的邮件，因此也将被排在邮件列表的顶端。

　　So if you want an email to get read, send it Sunday afternoon or early in the morning.

　　所以如果你想让人读到你的邮件，那就在周日下午或清晨发送吧。

本文关键字: 邮件列表