Send Time Optimisation in Email

The Send Time Optimization (STO) is a Machine Learning capability of Netcore CE. It allows you to personalize the communication time for each user based on their engagement behavior with your brand.

With STO, users receive emails at their preferred time, determined by past interaction patterns. For example, if a user consistently opens emails at 1:00 PM, the system will send their next email at 1:00 PM using STO, increasing the likelihood of them opening the email.

To determine each user's preferred hour, Raman (Netcore ML Engine) analyzes the user's past engagement behavior (opens and clicks) with emails. This prediction helps optimize the timing of email delivery. Users who do not meet the minimum data requirement eligibility criteria for predicting a preferred hour will be grouped under the unpredictable user base. The unpredictable user base does not have a preferred hour assigned to them.

By leveraging the STO feature, you can enhance the effectiveness of your email communication and increase user engagement.

Workflow of STO in Email

In every STO, Raman AI will send the communication to all users at their Preferred hour.

• These campaigns will be executed across 24 hours by default from the selected start time of the campaign.
• You can also set the end time for the campaign if you do not want it to run for 24 hours.

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Note

You can set the end-time of a campaign atleast 4 hours after the start time.

The rest of the users, which is the unpredictable base, as well as the user whose preferred hour does not fall between the start and end time, are grouped together and have the following options:

• Send at best time: These users will be sent the communication at the highest engaging hour across the entire user base of the client for that channel. This time is derived from the engagement dashboard.
• Send at custom time : Send at any time you select within the 24-hour window from the start time of the campaign.

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Note

You can set the custom time atleast 4 hours after the start time. There should be atleast 4 hours of gap between the start and end time of a STO campaign.

• Send at the end time : Send at the end of the email campaign. This would be the end time you selected or the default selection at the end of 24 hours.

Attribute creation

When STO is enabled for your Netcore CE dashboard, two new user attributes will be created on the All Contacts page. We have observed through analysis that the user's behavior is different on weekdays than on weekends. Here, we have two different preferred hours assigned to every user.

• EMAIL_PH_WEEK - Preferred Hour for users on weekdays.
• EMAIL_PH_WEEKEND - Preferred Hour for users on weekends.
• Values of these attributes would be (0 to 23), NULL - (0 is 12 am, 23 is 11 pm)

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Note

STO only works on regular email campaigns.To enable this feature please contact [email protected]. The Send Time Optimisation algorithm training duration is 24 hrs.

Control group

You can also add a control group to your STO campaign by enabling the control group toggle in the Schedule section.

• Select the percentage of your audience that you want to assign to the control group.
• By default, control group time will be set to one hour from the campaign start time. However, you can change it to any time within 24 hours of the start time.
• The control group users would be picked randomly from the predictable user base, which means only users with a preferred hour assigned to them.

The control group helps you to compare and analyze the effectiveness of the STO model. Control group users are selected from your preferred hour base (active users), and email is sent to all of them at the same specified time. You can then compare the results of this group to those of the users sent at their preferred hours.

Criteria for enabling AIML-based Send time Optimisation
STO Model Considers campaigns for the last 3-month

To Activate STO on the Netcore CE dashboard, fulfill the following criteria.

• At least 10 Email Campaigns should be there in the last 3 months.
• Overall, the Open Rates of those campaigns should be greater than 5%.
• The minimum user count on the Netcore CE dashboard should be greater than 10,000.