TABLE OF CONTENTS

• What is Predictive Campaign Scheduling?
• What is the Benefit of Predictive Campaign Scheduling?                                          

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. 

Tests conducted by Pinpointe have found that scheduling these new contacts after the predictive sends results in better overall deliverability statistics for a campaign. This is why if a given contact is new or lacks engagement history to determine an optimal delivery time, Pinpointe will send their email after all other predictive campaigns have been sent during the preceding 24 hours. 

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 their 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.  

Pinpointe has done all the work for you in terms of calculating the optimal time to send emails and then scheduling the actual sending pattern.

During your sending process, you will come to the Email Campaign Settings page (Fig 1). 

Fig 1 

Under Email Scheduling Options, the default setting for Enable Predictive Send is OFF.  Click on the button to set it to ON. 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's 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 Messages -> Email Message Queue. 

The campaign will be broken into as many as 24 sub-sends (1 for each hourly slot) 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 (Fig 2). 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. 

Fig 2

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 (Fig 3). As each sub-send begins, the statistics will be updated.

Fig 3

Each individual batch will have it's own statistics (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.