The Best Time for Call Time: 2020 Edition
One of our most-read resources on this blog is an article that takes a data-driven approach to answering a common question: when is the best time to do call time? Using over 50,000 phone calls, we examined some of the best days of the week and times of day to actually connect with the prospect or donor you’re trying to reach.
But that was in September of 2019 — nearly a year ago and, more importantly, a lifetime ago when it comes to the lifestyle factors that likely influence whether or not you reach someone by phone. The pandemic has changed how most people structure their days and weeks and we wanted to explore how this impacts the answer to your question about when you should be scheduling call time.
So this time we analyzed over 200,000 calls placed since March 15th. The first thing to note is encouraging: the total breakdown of call outcomes has mostly improved or stayed the same during this period, as compared with the entire cycle. About 44% of calls end in a voicemail and about 24% of calls receive no answer, which is very typical. The rate of connections is about 13% which is actually a couple of percentage points better than normal. The only negative trend is towards wrong numbers — about 8% of calls since the lockdowns began are to wrong numbers, up from about 5% overall for the cycle. (That’s to be expected, however, as we get closer to Election Day and campaigns spend more of their time doing colder outreach — a year ago, most people were still calling those in their more immediate networks.)
Here are some other useful takeaways:
There is now a remarkable level of consistency across days of the week, and hours of the day
Previously there had been some clear “winners” and “losers” when it came to days of the week with higher connect rates, and hours of the day that tended to lead more connections. This no longer appears to be true, at least for now. The national stay-at-home reality may be responsible for blurring the lines between the week and weekend, Monday and Friday, 9am and 2pm.
In fact, every day of the week has a connect rate that is within ~1.3 percentage points of every other — and the connect rate between 9am and 9pm each day is similarly stable. One exception is the 8–9pm hour, which may just be getting too late for most people to accept phone calls.
Call Time schedules don’t appear to have adjusted to this new reality
Despite the striking level of similarity among every day of the week and hours of the day, call time programs appear to still be operating with pre-pandemic expectations.
Very little call time is taking place on the weekends, and there is a big drop-off in calls on Friday, with calls strongest early on in the workweek. More than twice as many calls are being placed on Mondays than are being placed on Saturdays, despite the two days of the week having nearly identical connect rates.
Similarly, over half of analyzed calls were placed between 1pm and 5pm despite connect rates in that window being almost indistinguishable from most other hours throughout the day.
There are still some windows of time that are seeing better (and worse) results
When looked at separately and in the aggregate, the day of the week and the hour of the day seem to have little bearing on call outcomes since the pandemic began. However, when combined, there are a few hours on particular days of the week that have more successful connect rates than others.
Below are the periods that experienced a connect rate that was at least two percentage points better than the overall average since March:
- Mondays: 11am-12pm; 3–4pm
- Tuesdays: 9–10am; 7–8pm
- Wednesdays: 9–10am; 11am-12pm
- Fridays: 12–1pm
Aside from the generally poor 8–9pm hour, here are some other noteworthy under-performers:
- Sundays: 1–2pm
- Wednesdays: 6–7pm
- Thursdays: 9–10am
- Fridays: 6–7pm
- Saturdays: 3–5pm
Now’s the time to change up your call time schedule
This data suggests it is worth experimenting with which days and times you are scheduling call time. Everyone’s new normal seems to have expanded the reasonable options when it comes to finding times to reach people on the phone, but most campaigns haven’t yet made many noticeable shifts in their approach. The ones that have are seeing very positive results so far.
Of course, aggregate data can only tell you so much. Be sure you are tracking your own call performance in a manner that allows you to analyze your own connect rate by the time of day and/or day of the week. Consider using a software like CallTime.AI to automatically keep track of that data for you. One of the most powerful assets you have is the treasure trove of your own data you generate when calling every day — make sure you’re positioned to leverage it.