Overview

With this tool, you no longer have to spend time digging into complex analytics to find the best time to reach people. Send Time Optimization (STO) does the heavy lifting for you.

Send Time Optimization is a powerful function that analyzes the past 30 days of a contact's order history, site behavior, and interactions with your brand's messaging to determine the optimal time to send a message. This data is refreshed in Cordial on a daily basis to help you maximize customer engagement.

STO is currently available in batch emails and recurring email automations. Contact your CSM to learn more about enabling STO in your account.

Combining STO with message experiments is not currently supported.

How STO works

The Send Time Optimization tool analyzes the last 30 days of a contact's behavior and interaction with your brand and determines the best time to send messages based on the following criteria:

• If a contact has orders: STO determines the contact's most valuable order in the last 30 days. From there, STO finds the period of time between when the person clicked on the message connected to the order up to when they placed the order, picking the time when the contact first clicked on the message during that period.
• If there are no orders for a contact: STO looks for windows of time when a contact has browse and cart activity and picks the window with the most activity. STO then picks the time when the contact first clicked on a message during that window.
• If there is no browse or cart activity for a contact: STO looks for periods of time when the contact clicked on your brand's messages and picks the time with the most amount of activity. STO then picks the time when the contact first clicked on a message during this window.

Example scenarios

Scenario 1: Two weeks ago, a contact clicked on an email and then completed an order that totaled $300. One week ago, the same contact clicked on another email and completed an order that totaled $500. STO will pick the time when the contact first clicked the email that led to the $500 order.

Scenario 2: A person spends a lot of time on your site browsing products and adding items to their cart after engaging with your messages. STO will find the window of time when the person had the most browse and cart activity and trace it back to when they first clicked on the message connected to that activity.

Scenario 3: Someone clicks on your messages and reads them but doesn't take the next step of going to your site. STO will find the window of time when the person clicks messages most frequently.

STO requires sufficient contact activity data to make predictions. Contacts without sufficient activity data will receive messages at the start of your scheduled time.

Starting strategy

The following strategy is a great way to get started with STO.

Starting strategy: We recommend that you start with a daily batch campaign with static message content, an engaged audience, and no subject line or body experiments. This is a straightforward starting point so you can see how STO improves engagement and retention.

Ask your CSM for more brand-specific recommendations.

Optimize send time of a message

When you optimize the send time of a message, it will send at the ideal time for each individual contact. STO is available for batch messages and recurring message automations.

Use STO with batch messages

When using STO in batch messages, you can use the default STO window or create your own custom STO window.

Default STO window

The default (and recommended) STO window is within 24 hours after the start of sending. For example, if you schedule a send-time optimized message to go out tomorrow morning at 9 am, and a contact's optimal time to receive a message is at 3 pm, the contact will receive the message at 3 pm. 

1. Navigate to Messages and create a new message or access the draft of a message.

2. Click Edit in the Schedule pane.

3. Select the Optimize send time radio button.

4. Under Start batch sending, choose the time and date when you want to start sending your message. Cordial will send the message according to each contact's optimal send time—as determined by the STO algorithm—within 24 hours of that start time and date.

5. Click Save to use this send time.

Custom STO window

You can create a custom STO window if you want to reach contacts within a specific timeframe. 

If a contact’s STO value falls outside of the customized window—or they do not have a value set for the STO contact attribute—their message will send at the beginning of the scheduling window.

1. Under End time, switch the toggle to On to set a custom STO window.

2. Click Save to use this customized STO window.

Use STO with message automations

STO is available in message automations that are sent using the Recurring interval trigger.

1. Navigate to Automations > Create New Automation and select Email as the channel.

2. Create and save your message content.

3. Under Sending Methods, click Recurring.

4. Click Edit in the Schedule window.

5. Select the Use send time optimization button and configure as desired.

STO is available for messages sent on daily, weekly, and monthly intervals.

STO Message Performance

After you send a time-optimized message, go to the Message Performance page to dig into overall KPIs such as total messages sent, percentage delivered, percentage bounced, percentage opened, and more. 

• You can learn more about the Message Performance page here.

View optimized batch messages

1. Navigate to Messages > Email Sent to see the Schedule Method for your messages. This gives you a quick view into which messages have been optimized.

2. You can also select Send Time Optimization as a filter under Advanced Search.

STO attribute

Once you've used STO to send a message to a contact, you can find the STO attribute listed as crdl_ai_send_time in the person's Contact Profile.

Be aware of the new STO attribute so you don't accidentally delete or change it.

1. Navigate to Contacts > Contact Profile and locate the desired contact from the table.

2. From the Attributes page, scroll down to the Attributes pane. You can find the STO attribute (crdl_ai_send_time) here.

3. If desired, click Edit in the Attributes pane to rename the STO attribute. 

• You can learn more about contact attributes here.