30 Dec Einstein Send Time Optimization 101
Einstein is a collection of Salesforce AI product features across their products. Each Einstein product offered in Marketing Cloud Engagement deserves its own blog post. Today, I’m going to deep dive into Einstein Send Time Optimization (STO) for email. Einstein Send Time Optimization determines the best time to send an email. The tool also works for MobilePush, but that’s an article for another day. .By using machine learning, Einstein gives you the ability to target a user at their optimal send time when they are more likely to engage with your message.
Part of Offprem’s regular implementation steps are to activate Einstein Send Time Optimization in your account. This is turned on at the Business Unit level in the setup area of the tool. But how does the tool know when a subscriber’s optimized time is? The next step is to begin feeding the machine learning model by sending emails. Easy enough, right? Salesforce recommends 3 months of regular sending in order to have enriched enough data to begin utilizing the tool.
Your first party sending data is going to be the most impactful way to successfully target your users, but there are other sources that can come into play here to help you get full utilization of the product. Salesforce does a great job explaining this here, “The more data Einstein has, the more powerful the resulting predictions. Most organizations don’t have enough data to build their own models. To give you more meaningful predictive AI, Salesforce builds global predictive models that scan for aggregate, anonymous trends across many Salesforce customers. To protect your customer data, your account is opted out of the global data model by default.”
After about 90 days of regular sending in Marketing Cloud Engagement, it’s time to check out the quality of your data. Navigate to the Einstein tab > Einstein Send Time Optimization. From here, you are able to get a sense of the quality of your data.
Some tips for improving data quality here include:
1. Sending emails to consistent and engaged audiences
2. Sending emails at a variety of times of the day.
3. Sending emails at a variety of days of the week.
You are able to utilize STO at any given point, but of course, the better data, the better results.
The tool is accessible for email sends in Automation Studio and Journey Builder. I’ll use Journey Builder to build out this example use case.
How to set up Einstein STO activity in Journey Builder:
- Create your journey path as you normally would, inserting relevant email(s) and splits.
- To use STO, drag over the purple activity and place it in front of the email you’d like to optimize.
- Next, pick the time frame. This is one of my favorite parts of the tool. You still have control over the time frame in which an email goes out. So let’s say it was a time sensitive message that needed to go out within the next 12 hours. Select 12 hours, and STO will send the email when that individual subscriber is most likely to engage within that time frame.
One ideal use case of send time optimization is a client in the Manufacturing, Field Services, Automotive and Energy vertical, Advanced Development Methods, Inc. They’re better known as Scrum.Org – “a mission-based organization that helps people and teams solve complex problems by enabling them to apply Professional Scrum through training courses, certifications and ongoing learning all based on a common competency model.”
Scrum.Org provides continuing education and important resources to professionals all over the world. It was important to them to deliver timely and relevant communication to their subscribers no matter their time zone. Here’s where Einstein Send Time Optimization comes into play. By putting an STO activity with a 24 hour time frame ahead of their international campaigns, users receive their Scrum.Org emails at their most optimized time for engagement.
We only scratched the surface with the capabilities of Einstein STO. There are additional considerations, in-depth reporting features, an ability to lookup a specific user’s optimized send time, and more. Scrum.Org’s optimized sending resulted in a rating of 4.4 Customer Satisfaction Survey for Offprem based on the delivery of a successful implementation. Reach out to Offprem Technology to get started with setting Einstein Send Time Optimization up and be on the lookout for future blog posts on the topic.
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