What's the best time to email?

Yo! Paperboy here 🗞️

A 7-figure apparel brand owner recently asked me:

"I send every email at 8am, should I keep doing that?”

Instead of guessing, I pulled up their time of day and day of week reports to prove to them that was a bad strategy.

They were blown away by how quickly I could answer their question (and kicking themselves for not having asked this sooner).

I’ll break down how you can do this too.

It takes 30 seconds to pull.

It only works in Shopify though (Woo & Wix people try this).

And at the end I’ll give you a bunch of caveats & reasons to doubt this data.

The best day of the week to email

Copy and paste the URL below to do this for your store.

• Change the “your-admin-url-here” to your Shopify’s store admin URL name.

• If you don’t know your admin URL, just go to your Shopify admin and copy the string right after “store/”. E.g. https://admin.shopify.com/store/fake-store → fake-store is what you copy

https://admin.shopify.com/store/YOUR-ADMIN-URL-HERE/analytics/reports/total_sales_over_time?ql=FROM+sales%0A++SHOW+orders%0A++TIMESERIES+day_of_week+WITH+TOTALS%2C+PERCENT_CHANGE%0A++SINCE+startOfDay%28-90d%29+UNTIL+endOfDay%28-1d%29%0A++COMPARE+TO+previous_period%0A++ORDER+BY+day_of_week+ASC%0A++LIMIT+1000%0AVISUALIZE+orders+TYPE+line

If that doesn’t work, here’s the step-by-step.

How to build it:

1. Open Shopify and go to Analytics → Reports

2. Open the pre-built report called “Total sales over time”

3. Pick a time frame (I do 90 days)

4. Delete all the metrics on the right EXCEPT “Orders”

5. Change the dimension to “Day of week”

Should look like this

Voilà.

“But Paperboy why use orders instead of total sales”

You can. But most stores have weird wholesale & draft orders that throw things off. If you don’t have any weird outlier orders and know your data really well, go for it. This is just a launch point.

The best time of day to email

Change the “your-admin-url-here” to your Shopify’s store admin URL name.

https://admin.shopify.com/store/YOUR-ADMIN-URL-HERE/analytics/reports/total_sales_over_time?ql=FROM+sales%0A++SHOW+orders%0A++GROUP+BY+hour_of_day+WITH+TOTALS%2C+PERCENT_CHANGE%0A++TIMESERIES+hour_of_day%0A++SINCE+startOfDay%28-30d%29+UNTIL+today%0A++COMPARE+TO+previous_period%0A++ORDER+BY+hour_of_day+ASC%0A++LIMIT+1000%0AVISUALIZE+orders+TYPE+line

The steps are the same.

How to build it:

1. Open Shopify and go to Analytics → Reports

2. Open the pre-built report called “Total sales over time”

3. Pick a time frame (I do 90 days)

4. Delete all the metrics on the right EXCEPT “Orders”

5. Change the dimension to “Hour of day”

How to assess best time of day AND day of week

Sadly, there is no good way to do this nicely in a chart.

BUT that’s where ChatGPT or Sheets/Excel come in.

Update your dimensions to have BOTH Day of week and Hour of day.

You’ll see a CRAZY chart populate. Ignore it.

Export this data set to csv (3 dots in the top right).

Now if you’re an Excel nerd, you know what to do.

For all the normal people, drag the CSV into ChatGPT with this prompt:

I have a dataset showing the number of orders by day of week and hour of day. Each row includes:

Day of week: 0 = Monday, 1 = Tuesday, ..., 6 = Sunday

Hour of day: 0–23, representing the hour in international (UTC) time

Orders: The number of orders placed

Please:

For each individual day of the week, create a line chart showing how Orders vary by Hour of day.

Convert the Hour of day from 24-hour format to 12-hour AM/PM time labels on the x-axis.

For each day, provide a summary identifying the best time of day to send an email, based on when order activity peaks.

Optionally, include any observed trends or patterns, such as consistent peak hours or quiet periods across multiple days.

Use clear chart titles, labels, and concise summaries. Assume the end goal is to improve the timing of email outreach for maximum engagement.

Ok I know this is cool data. But stay with me now.

Caveats

Strategic thoughts

You can slice this data endlessly.

I like to pull this data to tell brands “no, we don’t need to send emails at 8am every morning”.

I assess what the 2 or 3 key moments are in the day for that demographic, then I do some campaign testing to see which does the best. From there, I allocate most campaigns to send during the best time, but still send campaigns during the other times to keep things fresh and hitting other customer time groups.

I also like to segment down to my first time customers and assess if there’s any low hanging fruit for my welcome and abandon checkout flow timing for new customer acquisition.

I’ve seen the outcome of this analysis look different for almost every brand I work with. It won’t transform your business, but it can help push your campaign revenue up by 2-5% which is a nice and easy win for bigger brands.

Can I do this in GA4

Yes - just follow the steps in this article.

Need email & SMS help?

If you’re a growing 7 or 8-figure brand that wants to increase Klaviyo revenue, click here to setup a discovery call with my team. We’ll send over 250 million emails this year on behalf of our clients!

Meme of the Week

That’s all for now,
Paperboy 🗞

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