Social email is the email you share with your friends in an open online destination. Your friends get your email where-ever they might be enjoying their online experience. It could be MySpace profile or Facebook application.

As a designer, question for us is to figure out the right time/day consumption pattern around our  email. If we go by the “social” part of our service then Facebook/Myspace model can help narrow down the popular time/day when user engages most.  If dominant mode is still email then new eROI report has interesting consequence for us as well.

eROI, a marketing research firm, came out with an interesting research report on when is the popular time/day when folks read their emails.

Some interesting data points. Best day for getting user attention is Wednesday -

• The average open rate on Wednesdays in the third quarter was 25.4%, and the average click rate was 3.9%.
• The second-best day for email was Monday, which had an average open rate of 24.7% and click rate of 3.1%.

4 PM seems to be the most popular time when people open their emails -

From a low of 2.6% at 8 AM to a high of 6.4% at 4 PM (down to 5.2% at 5 PM), in the case of click rates.

Also it seems travel discount deals are big motivator for people to open their emails -

The travel & lodging category was No. 1, with nearly half of email subscribers (46.7%) opening their emails and nearly 10% clicking through.

You can buy full report from eROI website.

Now going back to my original point about the best time to read social email. I believe lot of what goes into our inbox right now can be safely shared with our friends and family members. There is no reason why our friends should not see same discount deal from Marriott Hotel and be in a position to discuss that email in the same read context.

I believe as more of our content consumption goes social, we will see more linear pattern in timeline.

It would also be interesting to study how this email time/day analysis overlaps with Facebook or MySpace engagement time/day analysis.

Email is changing, it has to become more social and that will have big consequences for marketing processes built around Wednesday@4PM targeting.