If you’re a marketer wondering, “What is the best time to send an email campaign out?”
The answer is: “When your readers are most likely to open it.”
As we know, there is no one-size-fits-all timeslot when sending an email to all your subscribers. They live across different time zones and are active at different times of the day. And with the COVID and people being at home all the time, email behavior has changed significantly.
So, how can AI solve this?
Let’s take an example of a small mailing list with 10,000 subscribers and about 50 campaigns sent since inception.
Manually looking through the campaigns and identifying specific timeslots when each user had opened your emails is very time-consuming – and let’s face it, just plain boring!
And consider the same for millions of subscribers and 100s of campaigns? I’d give up already!
That’s where AI jumps in!
When it is a matter of analyzing humongous data sets, AI does it exponentially better and faster than humans can!
At Netcore, when we let our AI-engine, Raman, analyze our brand’s customers’ historical activity and predict the best time slots, the result was nothing short of mind-boggling!
So, we’ve decided to release this feature for all email senders of Netcore Emails.
Launching Send Time Optimization (STO) to increase your email engagement
Send Time Optimization is an AI-powered email delivery tool that activates with a single click.
Raman, our AI-engine, automatically sends the emails over 24-hours according to the customers’ activity data available.
How can STO help you?
With STO, you spend less time deciding when to send an email. Instead, you can focus on more important analytical tasks!
Here is what Raman’s STO magic can do for you, absolutely hands-off –
- Automatically analyze 90+ days of engagement data to identify the highest activity time slots for individual users
- When activated, Raman uses this data to then send emails individually based on the analysis. No more bulk emails with STO!
- Since your customers receive the emails at an appropriate time, they will see your emails at the top of their inboxes and are highly likely to open the email.
- Results? Improved engagement and a higher return on conversions!
How to send an STO email?
To start, you need to activate the STO feature for your account. If you have a fairly new account with less than 90 days of engagement data, you have to wait until there is enough data for Raman to analyze.
Once you are ready, drop us an email at [email protected] or connect with us on chat.
After you have STO activated, follow the steps below to send your first Send Time Optimized Email:
- Create a broadcast campaign and set up the email headers, your campaign content, your mailing segments/lists, and other required details.
- Now, check the “Send Time Optimization” checkbox under the “schedule broadcast” tab as shown in the screenshot below
- Next, send your email out!
Alternatively, if you send emails using Netcore Email API, add a flag stating “STO: True” in your request API/SMTP header. Your email will then be STO-enabled.
Things to note before sending out STO emails
Here are a few pointers to note before using STO for your emails:
- The emails are sent out over 24-hours. So if you have a time-sensitive campaign, it’s best to send it without STO.
- There will be little to no data available for users who have recently subscribed to your list. Due to a lack of historical data, Raman cannot identify the best send times. And so, emails to all the customers falling in this category are sent after the 24-hour STO sending cycle is complete.
- Raman, our smart assistant, learns on its own! It re-analyzes your engagement data every week to refresh the time slots. This is done to recognize changes in activity patterns and to adapt your sending time based on changed user behavior.
Wrapping up
It’s time to move away from sending bulk emails in 2021. User behavior has changed and so should marketing. With send-time-optimization, you’re one step closer to achieving your customer’s attention inside the inbox. Send the email right on time, with the use of this artificial intelligence feature to achieve your email marketing objectives.
Want to know how STO has helped businesses from various industry sectors? Read our study of 50+ billion emails in our Email Benchmark Report to answer this. Explore how user behavior has evolved in regards to emails!
