Send time optimisation a part of AI hyper-personalisation involves the strategy of sending out marketing emails at moments when a specific individual consumer is most likely to be receptive to them. Any hyper-personalisation market report underlines its importance. Traditionally, marketers would often base their timing on when the majority of people in a specific group tend to open and interact with their messages. First and foremost though it is essential to understand customer preferences in your emails.
However, this universal approach often results in many people getting messages at times when they are less inclined to respond. In contrast, the concept of AI send time optimisation leverages data science and artificial intelligence to automatically determine the perfect moment to dispatch emails or notifications to each individual, coinciding with the rise of email marketing.
By considering personal habits, such as usage frequencies and times when they are most likely to check their email or look at their phone, the system can ensure that messages are delivered when recipients are most likely to be available. Deep learning enables the system to perpetually perfect the send time for each individual, as it is perpetually trying and testing and improving. This method is highly effective in increasing the chances of engagement.
You might also like to read about when not to use deep learning.
How does send time optimisation (STO) work?
Send time optimisation (STO), is a component of professional AI hyper-personalisation software, making the despatch time unique to each specific individual, personal to them. Depending on the quality and calibre of the data available it perpetually changes for each recipient, as their habits, product selection and the influence you create change. As every marketer is aware, there’s an abundance of information available for creating and distributing emails. The trend is that we no longer think in terms of campaigns, as email to a specific customer is perpetual, dynamic and unique.
However, turning this data into useful insights that can be acted upon necessitates the use of machine learning, unless one prefers to handle it by hand. STO employs real-time AI technology to examine the behaviour of individuals, such as their usage habits and the times they are most likely to both open and positively react to that email. This aspect of AI hyper-personalisation technology determines the best moment to deliver the perfect product selection, ensuring it reaches the recipient when they are most likely to notice and interact with it.
The more information an AI tool has about a person, the more precise the timing can be. STO collects data from a customer’s entire journey, meaning the optimal send times are not fixed. As a person’s actions change over time, the real-time AI system records and incorporates this new information into the broader analysis. Up-to-date information is given more importance than older data.
The main objective in your emails is engagement, which is always most successful as dictated by email content relevancy and determining the right time to be received. Yet, the exact measures differ across different platforms. In email marketing, send time optimisation aims to enhance two key indicators: the open rate (measured by dividing the number of unique opens or clicks by the total emails sent) and the click rate (measured by dividing the number of unique email clicks by the total emails sent).
Benefits of send time optimisation
Consider Send Time Optimisation (STO) as the forthcoming advancement in marketing strategies. Initially, when email marketing began, sending out messages was a largely manual task, and the timing was often based on educated guesses. As email marketing developed, marketers moved beyond basic email guidelines, such as preferring midweek or early morning for their messages, and began to segment their lists. They would then tailor their approach based on time zones or employ methods like A/B testing to vary the timing of email sends and boost interaction.
Pre-AI STO elevated this level of refinement even more. For instance, two individuals within a segmented marketing list might have a significant degree of similarity in terms of demographics, their path to purchase, level of engagement, and loyalty to the brand, yet exhibit very different patterns in how they respond to marketing messages.
AI send time optimisation as one element within hyper-personalisation in email marketing now takes us further than ever before, and removes the uncertainty in determining the best possible time to send marketing messages, by leveraging actual data and advanced machine learning to customise the timing for each customer. It is not inhibited by quantity, which again is dictated by the individual’s unique needs, wants and preferences, and so enables the nurturing of each consumer’s lifetime value with you, enabling your empathy with them throughout their lifetime as your customer, so you best serve their needs and not the other way around.
You may like to see the top 10 AI hyper-personalisation software providers or the distinctions between the top 30 hyper-personalisation providers.
