What is the best time to send an email? It’s one of the most common questions we get asked. And unfortunately, it comes with a frustrating answer. We don’t know. It really depends! That’s because the best time to send an email doesn’t exist. It differs from industry to industry, brand to brand, day to day. The influencing factors are endless. But all is not lost. As well as continually testing your emails to identify the best time to send for the highest engagement, there is also a handy feature available to ensure your emails land in the inbox at the perfect time. Intelligent Time Sending.

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In a nutshell, Intelligent Time Sending (ITS) uses machine learning to enable brands to send emails to individuals based on the specific time they are most likely to engage. Simple. The feature achieves this by identifying what time individual recipients are engaging with your emails the most, based on historical open data which it continuously gathers. To begin with, ITS will start collecting data based on your email campaign opens. This will set the foundations of the ITS logic. And creates a profile for each individual recipient. It then uses this data to determine the most likely time that each recipient will open your emails. And here is where the magic happens. ITS will send your email to a recipient 30 minutes prior to their highest engagement time so that your email is sitting at the top of their inbox. Ready to be opened. And not buried amongst other emails. ITS works over a 24 hour period. So for instance, if an email campaign is scheduled for 10am, but a recipient normally opens their emails at 9am. ITS will postpone sending to this recipient until the following day.

ITS use cases

To help you understand how ITS could be used by a brand like yourselves, here are some typical use cases and benefits. Multiple time zones ITS is particularly beneficial for brands that send across multiple time zones. For instance, if a London-based brand sends an email at 9am GMT. This will arrive in inboxes at 4am in New York. This means that there are hours’ worth of other emails burying the communication before the recipient is likely to start checking their inbox. Varied audience If a brand has a real mix of recipients in their database, such as students, full-time employed, and retirees, their schedules will be differing dramatically. For instance, full-time employees may be checking their inboxes as soon as they get into work. Whereas students may be more engaged after their lectures and seminars. Using ITS means that brands can ensure that all of these audiences are catered for. Reducing the need to manually send specific campaigns to specific segments, which would duplicate workloads. Low engagement rates It may go without saying, but if a brand is suffering from low engagement rates within their email, timing could make all the difference. There are lots of elements to consider changing to increase engagement. However, we always recommend making changes one step at a time. And instead of looking at resource-intensive elements such as branding, content, and personalisation. Timing is a straightforward place to start. By getting the timing of your emails right, not only do you increase the chances of your recipient opening. But you also add an additional layer of personalisation. Sending the right email, at the right time, to the right recipient.

Challenges with ITS

Fortunately, ITS is fairly fool proof and comes with few challenges. The main issue brands could face is a lack of data. For instance, if an email campaign is scheduled, but some of the recipients have not opened enough times for a valuable profile to have been built. However, the repercussions of this are minimal. Instead, the recipient will receive the email at the normal send time. And the ITS feature will continue gathering data on their habits to use for a future send. So the more emails you send, the more accurate your data becomes.

How to use ITS

Getting started with ITS is a straightforward process if you’re using the Pure360 email marketing platform. The ITS feature can be activated simply by ticking the checkbox for optimal inbox placement within stage three of the campaign schedule process. Easy. But of course, if you have any issues, or if you aren’t using Pure360 and would like to benefit from ITS, then get in touch with one of our experts. They are always on hand to help.