What is Predictive Campaign Scheduling?
Predictive campaign scheduling (also called predictive delivery) uses contact engagement history to determine what is the optimal time within a 24-hour period to send a campaign to a given contact. Selecting a send time based on a contact's past behavior maximizes the likelihood the contact will open the received campaign. If a given contact is new or does not yet have enough engagement history to compute an optimal delivery time, Pinpointe will send their email after all other predictive campaigns have been sent during the preceding 24 hours. Tests conducted by Pinpointe have found that scheduling these new contacts after the predictive sends (as opposed to before) results in better overall deliverability statistics for a campaign. PLEASE NOTE: This means contacts that do not have enough history to predict the best send time will receive the campaign after all other emails are sent. Such would be the case if you are a new Pinpointe customer or your targeted database or list is made up of new contacts. Based on this, please plan your send times accordingly if you want your campaign to be sent on a specific date or time.
What is the Benefit of Predictive Campaign Scheduling?
The first and primary goal of an email marketing campaign is to get the contact to open the received email. Before any links can be clicked, buttons selected or content viewed, the recipient must first open the email. Predictive Campaign Scheduling uses the natural tendency of people to follow patterns to determine when a given contact most often engages with marketing emails.
How do I use Predictive Campaign Scheduling in Pinpointe?
Pinpointe has done all the work for you in terms of calculating the optimal time to send emails and then to schedule the actual sending pattern. All you need to do is click a single button to activate the feature.
During your sending process, you will come to the email campaign and scheduling settings page. Under EMAIL SCHEDULING SETTINGS you will see the "Automatically choose best send time" option. The default setting for the feature is "Off". To activate predictive campaign scheduling, click the button to "On". PLEASE NOTE: You may NOT select both the "Automatically choose best send time" (Predictive Campaign Scheduling) and "Batch Sending" function simultaneously.
That's it! You now have activated Predictive Campaign Scheduling. All that is left to do is to click the "Next>>" button at the bottom of the current page and click the "Schedule My Email Campaign" on the following final page of the send process. You can view the current status of a send by going to Email Campaigns -> Campaign Queue. The campaign will be broken into as many as 24 sub-sends - 1 for each hourly slot if necessary based on the predictive calculations. If there are no recipients predicted to open at a given time slot, then nothing will be scheduled for that slot (I.e. there will be fewer than 24 sub campaigns). Presented below is an example of what you would see in Campaign Queues. This example shows a four-slot send based on a specific list of contacts. You may refresh this screen from time to time to see the progress of the sub-sends.
Once your campaign has been scheduled to send, you may review the campaign statistics for each sub-send and the overall campaign send by going to Statistics -> Email Campaign Statistics. As each sub-send begins, the statistics will be updated. Presented below is a representative example of what you would see. In this case, no sub-send has yet begun.
Each individual batch will have it's own statistics in terms of recipients, opens, clicks, etc. At the top of the batch list will be the aggregate statistics for the entire campaign send, which is simply a total of all batches up to that point in time. As each batch is sent, the aggregate total will be updated to include this new batch. These individual batch statistics can give you valuable insight as to engagement rates for a given time of day. For example, you may find that open rates are fairly uniform across various times but that click rates are higher for evening hours after work when recipients have more free time to interact with your email content.
If you would like to watch a video on this topic: