This is unreal…

For anyone who tries to deny that texting can be addictive, just take a look at 13-year-old Reina Hardesty. Last month, she sent 14,528 text messages, a number that her father couldn’t believe at first.

When Greg Hardesty got his daughter’s 440-page long phone bill, he saw the number and thought, as he put it, “That’s insane, that’s impossible.” Using a calculator, he realized that it means Reina was sending 484 messages a day, which comes out to one every two minutes if she’s awake for an average of 16 hours. The monthly average for kids ages 13 to 17 is 1,742 messages, according to a Nielsen survey.

Luckily, Reina’s plan included unlimited texts, saving her dad — who admits to sending 900 texts a month — from paying almost $3,000. She claims it’s because she has a close group of girls around her age who she describes “four obsessive texters.” She even admits that during her birthday party, she was texting her best friend — who was sitting right next to her.

Though Reina isn’t in any trouble with her folks, she’s now been banned from texting after dinner. [From: The New York Post via Textually]

What Kind of Open Rates Are People Getting?
If you’re sending HTML emails, you probably use your open rate to help gauge your success.

Even though it’s not a perfect measure of whether people are actually opening and reading your emails, it’s useful as a relative measure:

If it goes up over a short period of time, more people are probably reading

If it falls over a short period of time, it’s almost certain fewer people are reading.

Plus, all other things being equal, it can give you some motivation (if your open rates are lower than other senders’) or satisfaction (if your rates are higher).

So, here goes…

Average Open Rate Last Month: 13.6%

When Is/Was The Best Day To Send?
You’ll often hear (at least, I often hear) that Tuesday is the optimal day to send, because on Monday people are catching up from the weekend, and that on Tuesday morning you’ll have their undivided attention before they jump into their work for the upcoming week.

Do the numbers back up that theory? Let’s see.
The breakdown of open rates by day of the week:

Monday
13.67%
Tuesday
13.21%
Wednesday
14.07%
Thursday
14.52%
Friday
13.25%
Saturday
12.09%
Sunday
13.26%

Last month, Tuesday was actually the second-worst day to send, at least if you’re measuring by open rates.

(While we’re breaking assumptions, I should point out this, too: the hour of the day that got the best open rate was not 8-9AM, or 9-10AM, but in fact 2-3PM Eastern Time — email newsletters sent during that hour last month enjoyed a 19.1% open rate.)

Does This Mean I Should Switch My Campaigns To Thursdays?

In a word: No.

Don’t break with your readers’ expectations just to try to follow the latest day of the week stats. You might actually reduce your open rate by doing so.
In both March and February, Thursday newsletters got the 3rd-worst opens vs. the rest of the week.

I hesitated a little to publish these stats, because I’m concerned that people might flock to sending their newsletters at the day or time that happened to get the best results lately.
Please, don’t drastically change your sending times/days just because you see that the average last month, or any month, happened to be higher on a different day or time.
Yes, you might eventually be able to shift your sending schedule, or split test some broadcasts, but if you up and move everything, you may throw off subscribers who are used to hearing from you at the usual time.

“It’s So Busy, Nobody Goes There Anymore”

To get at the other reason for not shifting your sending based on these stats, let’s paraphrase Yogi Berra (see above).
If everyone switches their sending schedule to send on say, Thursday, then recipients will start getting a ton of email that day, and start paying less attention to each individual email.

One possible reason for Thursday’s success last month may be that it wasn’t as popular as say, Tuesday or Wednesday for sending email:
Percentage of Newsletters Sent by Day

Monday
16.0%
Tuesday
17.7%
Wednesday
16.9%
Thursday
16.6%
Friday
15.2%
Saturday
8.8%
Sunday
8.8%

Those higher-volume days mean more emails in readers’ inboxes, which might contribute to reduced open rates. Following that reasoning, some people may look at the low weekend volume (more email newsletters were sent on Tuesdays than on Saturdays and Sundays combined) and see an opportunity to get their audiences’ undivided attention.

My main point in showing these is to point out that our assumptions about what works are often quite wrong, and that you ultimately have to test for yourself to see what best suits your audience.

Some Inspiration… And Some Help
Are you getting better open rates than this?
If so, GREAT! Give yourself a pat on the back…
…but don’t get complacent. Open rates aren’t the be-all, end-all of email metrics. They don’t guarantee that people are reading your emails, only that they have images turned on and that they probably saw your email for at least a moment.

Plus, there’s always room for improvement, right?
Some ideas that can help you raise your open rates:

Ask people to add you to their address books. Some email programs will display images from senders who are in the recipient’s contact list.

If you are putting pictures in your emails, use the ALT text for those images to pique readers’ interest in what the picture is, so that they enable images. Or, just directly ask readers to turn on images!

Add a picture of yourself to your emails, near/next to your signature. People like seeing your smiling face, and if they see it in one of your emails, they may be more likely to turn on images to see it again later.

“FBI and White House officials told the Obama campaign that they believed that a foreign entity or organization sought to gather information on the evolution of both camps’ policy issues — information that might be useful in negotiations with a future administration,” Newsweek said.

“Obama technical experts later speculated that the hackers were Russian or Chinese,” the magazine said, adding that the FBI had assured the Obama team that the attack had not been carried out by its political opponents.

Newsweek said technology experts at the Obama headquarters discovered the cyber attack in midsummer and initially thought it was a computer virus.

But the FBI and Secret Service warned them the system had been compromised and a “serious amount of files” had been stolen. They said the McCain campaign’s computer system had been similarly compromised.

Newsweek said the Obama campaign retained a security firm following the attack and ended the intrusion.

Look no further than this analysis of results from PCMag’s SurfSpeed app, a utility that grabs pages (and page elements) from several popular Web sites to measure your actual Internet surfing speed—not the bandwidth allocation your ISP quotes you. In the past few weeks, we’ve pored over data points collected from more than 17,000 profiles (that is, unique IP addresses)—comprising over 200,000 individual tests—to find out which are the fastest ISPs in America. Using this data, we’ve also taken a long, hard look at each state in the country, because fast overall service doesn’t translate into fast local service. One provider may have tremendous averages nationwide yet give short shrift to your corner of the country. In this story, we first discuss the United States as a whole; then we walk through a state-by-state analysis to see just how each of the Union’s fifty square up.

In addition, SurfSpeed polls users on satisfaction with their ISPs, and we analyze the answers side by side with the speed data. It’s interesting to consider satisfaction alongside speed, but note that in only three states were more than 50 percent of users satisfied. The relative positions of ISPs coincide for the most part with the information from our annual Reader Satisfaction Survey, especially among cable service providers. But the satisfaction numbers from SurfSpeed point to a global truth: Faster is always better.