Go to bed with a zero inbox, wake up to 8 messages. Check email on the bus in: 5 marketing offers, 1 new follower, 1 coworker correspondence, 1 company emailbot telling me I still have no items caught by our spam filter (YAY!). I’ve got the iPhone set to show me the first 3 lines of copy of the email. Based on skimming the initial copy, I do the following, in order: delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, I’ll read this in the office, delete. 

See what I did there?

The Official Email Marketing Handbook postulates that people go to their inbox first thing in the morning when they get to the office, so make sure they have something to look at. Well, I check my email on the bus often so I can start working when I get in (or read the news on a bigger screen, most likely). Its a 12-minute ride, and I’m still half-asleep, so unless there’s something really captivating in the first 200 characters or so of the email — or its from the rare sender that doesn’t send me something every single damn day — its getting cybertossed to the cyberwaste cyberbin.

Its interesting that come the end of the working day, anywhere from 5-7 PM, I no longer care about work email and sometimes the games or music I have don’t interest me. Nor do I want to read some serious articles per se. I think I’d appreciate some light reading material for the bus ride home, but no one seems to send email marketing material out toward the end of the work day.

So here we are, in 2010, on trains and busses at 5:30 PM for anywhere from 10 to maybe 90 minutes, on iPhones and Blackberries and, realistically, some wi-fi or 3G-enabled laptops. Anyone else see a missed email marketing opportunity?