Today I wanted to share a trick for answering the age-old question of 'when do I send my emails?'. And we are going to do this using our Google Analytics data.
Step 1: Create a New Custom Report
In the left-hand menu, expand 'Customization' and choose Custom Reports. Then click New Custom Report and you get to this screen,
Step 2: Building Your Report Rules
In Metric Group, you want to choose Pageviews. And in Dimensions Drilldowns, you want to first choose Day of Week Name and the secondary dimension is Hour. It looks like this,
Step 3: Save and Drilldown
Next you want to add a Secondary Dimension to this view so using the dropdown, select Hour and you get this,
Step 4: Analyze
How I can see from my report that my site gets the most pageviews on Tuesdays at 1pm and the second highest is Tuesdays at 8am. You can see that here,
Now I know when my site is getting visitors and this is when my audience is engaging with my content. Since it seems highly likely they will interact with my brand and be looking for what I have to offer during these times during the week, this is when I will email my database.
TIP: Never stop testing! While this is a good tactic to see if your open/click rates change, it may not be the best time for your email send. Perhaps this is when people are reading emails so try earlier in the day.