Clikz: Arrival Time and Response Rate Decline
This article is about how people generally deal with the mountain of email each morning- they cut out the non-urgent crap as quickly as possible.
It made me think about the dependence of many online communities on email and how administrators might consider altering the timing of email digests to help more members choose to read the info instead of deleting it.
Basically- the article is saying that emails that are lumped into the "morning mound" are more likely to be dismissed- and if you want to get someone's attention, send it during business hours.
This article is in the context of email marketing (which sometimes feels icky to me) - but I think the same holds true for online community messages.
When I was an online community manager, we used digests (one email with compiled messages) as the primary email resource and everyone's default timing was set for 2AM- making each digest a part of the morning mound.
This article made me think that there might be some merit in changing the default timing to, say, 12 noon, or 10AM- in an effort to prevent the user from dismissing it early in the day.
Of course, I think the best option is to give the member a choice. But, from what I observed, most users will stick with the default- so it might be good to set the default timing to a time that maximizes the likelihood of the message being read.
FYI,Web Crossing has a great utility in their tool that allows the user to pick the days and hours they would like to receive the digest. I haven't seen similar tools elsewhere.