When should I send my message?

Many Signal Vine users wonder what day and time is best to send their texts so that they get the highest engagement rates. As with any type of messaging, this is going to depend on your audience - so we've broken it down for you.

High School Students - When communicating with high school students, the one thing to keep in mind is the school day and avoiding disruptions. We work with organizations that message before the day starts (around 7AM), but the best response rate is with messages that are sent around 3PM. This is the "sweet spot" when school is done for the day and after school activities haven't yet started.  

College Students - If you're texting college students, we recommend sending your messages mid-day during the week. While we know some students do sign up for those dreaded 8AM classes, sending a message too early can result in ignored messages and even higher opt-out rates. Ideally, most of the messages to this population are being sent between an 11AM-2PM window to get the best engagement from your students.

Parents - Not everyone is messaging the student, and so for folks reaching out to parents it a little fuzzy. It's important to keep the work day in mind. Similar to high school students, you don't want to cause a disruption in their day or add to the chaos of the morning. In this instance, we recommend sending messages after the work day to get the best visibility with this population. 

These recommendations are based on our experiences with organizations across the country, but we also encourage you to use the Analytics tab in the platform to monitor your specific engagement rates. Testing different sending days and times is the best way to know what works with your participants and it is all viewable right in your analytics.

All this to say, whenever you're sending messages out - you should be prepared to answer them coming in. You're texting to cut through the noise and get information out quickly, so responses are going to come in quickly. Make sure that when a message goes out, you have properly staffed to make sure that as responses come in, someone is there to answer them. Nothing is worse, then sending out a message at 7PM on a Friday night and either not responding until Monday morning OR spending the night in texting back.