Send-Time Optimization send-time-optimization
Ă۶ąĘÓƵ Journey Optimizer’s Send-Time Optimization feature, powered by Ă۶ąĘÓƵ Journey AI services, selects the optimal send time for email and push messages. This feature maximizes customer engagement by analyzing historical open and click behavior.
Why is Send-Time Optimization important?
Timing directly impacts customer engagement. By leveraging historical behavior insights, the feature ensures messages reach customers at the most engaging time. This improves open rates, click-through rates, and overall campaign performance.
Send-Time Optimization is available only for Journey Optimizer’s built-in Email and Push action types. It does not support custom actions or other action types. Additionally, it applies exclusively to Email and Push actions within Journeys and does not support messages sent through Campaigns.
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The Send-Time Optimization feature is enabled for Ă۶ąĘÓƵ Journey Optimizer customers upon request. Contact Ă۶ąĘÓƵ Customer Care or your Ă۶ąĘÓƵ representative to activate the feature for your organization.
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Send-Time Optimization applies only to Email and Push notification channels.
Use Send-Time Optimization use-send-time-optimization
Enable Send-Time Optimization for an email or push action by activating the Send-Time Optimization switch in the action parameters.
Avoid using Send-Time Optimization for urgent, time-sensitive operational messages, such as order confirmations, password reset notifications, or flight gate changes. This feature is ideal for non-urgent marketing communications, such as weekly ads, promotional materials for new products, or month-long sale details.
Choosing the right optimization metric for emails
For email messages, select whether to optimize for email opens or email click-throughs by choosing the appropriate radio button. Push messages are always optimized for opens.
For example:
​- Optimize for Clicks when your email encourages actions, such as visiting a promotional webpage or signing up for an event.
​- Optimize for Opens if your email contains purely informational content, such as a newsletter or update, and does not require further engagement.
Configuring the send window
For email and push messages, set the maximum number of hours the system will wait before sending the message by entering a value for the “Send within the next” option. Values can range from 1 to 168 hours.
For example:
​- If you set “Send within the next” to 6 hours, the system will determine the best send time within the next six hours.
​- If you set “Send within the next” to 168 hours (7 days), the system may select a send time at any point within the next seven days.
When your journey is activated and a customer reaches the Email or Push action, Send-Time Optimization selects the best predicted send time for each user within your specified limits.
How Send-Time Optimization works how-send-time
The Send-Time Optimization model analyzes your organization’s Ă۶ąĘÓƵ Journey Optimizer customer behavior data, including user-level open and click events, to predict when customers are most likely to engage with your messages.
How are predictions made?
Send-Time Optimization predicts engagement likelihood for each hour of the week, for each user, using three types of behavioral data:
- Overall user behavior: How your customers typically interact with messages across your organization.
- Lookalike user behavior: Insights from users with similar behavioral patterns in the same time zone.
- Individual user behavior: Specific data from the user’s past engagement with emails and push notifications.
These predictions are weighted and combined using a Bayesian approach, resulting in a “heat map” for each metric (email opens, email clicks, and push opens) for each customer. The heat map highlights the hours of the week when contacting the user is most likely to achieve the desired engagement outcome.
Example of heatmap-based decision
If a user with the above predicted probabilities is targeted for a message at 9 AM Wednesday with Send-Time Optimization enabled and a 7-hour maximum wait time, the selected send time for the message will be 12 PM:
Send-Time Optimization model training and scoring details model-send-time
Once Send-Time Optimization is enabled for your organization, the Journey AI model trains on email and push send, open, and click events across all your organization’s journeys and actions from the last 16 weeks—regardless of whether those actions use Send-Time Optimization. This ensures the model leverages comprehensive data from your customers.
Training and exploration
Models are initially trained and scored weekly. After 16 weeks, models are retrained and rescored monthly. Scoring includes all customer profiles, both existing and new, since the latest scoring run.
Messages sent using Send-Time Optimization receive either an “exploration” send time (to test various send times and observe customer responses) or an “optimized” send time (to maximize engagement). Five percent of send events are exploration-based, while 95% are optimized.
For example:
If a message is selected at 9 AM Wednesday with Send-Time Optimization enabled and a 3-hour maximum wait time, exploration send times for the message will be divided evenly among 9 AM, 10 AM, 11 AM, and 12 PM.
Frequently Asked Questions faq-send-time
Your organization should use the Email action within Journey Optimizer for at least 30 days to collect email send, open, and click events before using Send-Time Optimization for Email.
Similarly, your organization should use the Push action within Journey Optimizer for at least 30 days to collect push send and open events before using Send-Time Optimization for Push.
If your organization has already used the Email and/or Push action types for at least 30 days, Send-Time Optimization can be used immediately after activation. Results improve as more data is collected over a 16-week period.
_experience.intelligentServices.journeyAI.sendTimeOptimization. These scores are not human-readable to minimize their impact on profile richness.Send-Time Optimization may improve email click rates and push open rates by approximately 2% to 10% across all messages optimized by an organization.
For example, if an organization has a 5.0% email click rate without optimization, the same emails optimized by Send-Time Optimization might achieve a 5.5% click rate on average (5.0% * (1+10%) = 5.5%).
Greater benefits are likely when:
- Existing journeys use fixed, non-optimized send times.
- Customer behavior variability (clicks and opens) aligns with location and preferences.
- A larger fraction of email and push messages use Send-Time Optimization.
- Maximum wait times fall within the recommended range of 6–12 hours.
This may occur due to:
- Your message being selected for an “exploration” send time instead of an “optimized” send time.
- Lookalike user behavior influencing the model to recommend another send time.
timeZone profile field to determine a user’s time zone. If unavailable, it infers the time zone from other geographic information in the user’s profile, such as country or state.Push messages may be sent during the night if:
- Users exhibit behavior indicating engagement with night-time messages.
- The model selects an “exploration” send time.
To prevent night-time Push messages, schedule batch sends for the morning or early afternoon and use a shorter maximum wait time, such as 9 AM with an 8-hour maximum wait.