Timing is Everything for Email Campaigns

When it comes to email marketing, you want to make sure the right message reaches the right person at the right time to drive engagement and ROI. Consumers are flooded with marketing messages, and if you don’t send your message at the time your audience is most likely to engage, it may get lost in the shuffle.

Determining the best time to send your campaign

You can pore through mountains of historical data to see when each contact in your list typically reads their emails, but given the size of contact lists and the amount of past behavior data points, this is most likely not feasible nor practical.

Instead, you can let Maropost’s “Send Time Optimization” feature take the guesswork out of determining the best time to send to every subscriber. Send Time Optimization simply “learns” audience behavior by looking at when people are most likely to open an email, and then determines the best time to send for each individual contact.

Say, for instance, you send an email to two people: Megan and Jay. Both fall into the same persona and lifecycle stage. While they both receive the email, they react very differently. Jay opens and engages; Megan does not. Why?

It’s all in their email engagement behavior. Jay might be super-organized, setting aside time every day on his commute home to read email. Megan, on the other hand, may only read email every Thursday. Sending your email when people are most likely to open it drives higher deliverability, higher engagement, and higher marketing ROI – and minimizes the risk of losing them to a passive unsubscribe list.

How our platform analyzes past behavior

Determining optimal send times traditionally came through experimentation, data analysis, common sense, and “gut feel”. It was part art, part science, and part guess. With Send Time Optimization, we use AI – we call it Da Vinci. Da Vinci helps marketers solve a very important question – “when is the best time to interact with each individual consumer?”. And knowing that answer in real-time has the potential to massively increase the performance and revenue generation of every email campaign.

Da Vinci takes the guesswork out of choosing the right time to send a broadcast email campaign because it understands the optimal time to interact with each customer based upon their behavior. Da Vinci “learns” your audiences’ behaviors by mining through millions of historical email engagement records. It looks at when each contact has been opening their email they receive in their inbox and uses that information for optimal engagements for the next send. And our machine learning algorithm also adapts to any behavioral change – true precision marketing.

Send options

Available to all Professional or Enterprise customers, Send Time Optimization determines the best time to send your campaign based upon previous engagement behavior. It’s the perfect tool for emails that are not time-sensitive but still aimed at maximizing marketing ROI.

However, there are other options designed to better support your specific send use case.

Priority Send^®, our most common send option, will send emails to your most engaged audience first, while your least engaged move to the bottom of the send priority. This is our unique way of allowing our clients to put their best foot forward with every campaign to ensure the highest opportunity for inboxing.

One Time^® will send your campaign according to your contacts’ respective time zones, based off of our “chasing the sun” algorithm. For example, if you have a list of customers that are in three different time zones, you can select your One Time send to occur at the same specified time in each of those time zones.

Conversion Time Optimization is perfect for ecommerce businesses that want to optimize a promotional campaign. This send option determines the optimal time to send a promotional email for each contact based upon previous purchase history when they are most likely to buy.

Schedule Recurring keeps your send on auto-pilot by sending a recurring campaign every day or on specific days of the week, every week, every month or every year.

Learn more about our scheduling options when creating a new campaign.

Check out our pricing pages if you need to change plans or request a demo.

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