Find the best time to send emails with Google Analytics

Finding the optimal time to send an email can feel like a shot in the dark, especially when you're first testing your email strategies.

However, with Google Analytics, you can try a few things.

The best time of day to send your marketing emails is when you are currently present in the minds of your contacts.  But how do they know when they're thinking about you?

Well, without psychic powers, you can't really. However, you can get a solid estimate by checking your analytics. If a contact is on your website, you are clearly present in their mind right now as well.

Find out the best time to send

The hosting or rather the hosting plan play a special role in the speed. The faster the hoster's servers respond.

This can be a bit trickier as there is often a larger.res window of regular traffic. However, it is still possible to gain some insight from the graph. It just helps to try it out a bit.

Again, look for the days that have more traffic. It is common for email traffic to be heavier in the middle of the week than on Monday, Friday and weekends.

Locate them, the better the site can respond. Cheap shared hosting offers are particularly bad, where often hundreds of websites have to share the resources of one server. 

In any case, it is worth investing more money for hosting and choosing a premium hosting model. Here, the website is either alone or with only a few other sites on its own vServer. Thus, more resources are available and the site can respond faster to all requests.  It is optimal if a separate CPU core is available for each website installation, which is able to keep up with the high workloads of a large website.

Also important in this context: Optimized server update times so that outages are always outside core business hours.

Fine-tuning

This is a good start to finding the best times to send your emails, but it's only a guideline - your actual open rates should be the deciding factor. Take a look at your own Google Analytics chart and start with the day and time you've determined to have the highest traffic, then vary your send days and times (one at a time to minimize variables) within your window and compare the results to dial in your ideal send.