AI in Email Marketing: Send Time Optimization

If your business has been looking for ways to start using artificial intelligence (AI) in your marketing, one channel you’ve likely considered is email.

Most businesses rely heavily on email as part of their sales and marketing strategy, and as Google phases out third-party cookies, the need for a strong contact database and an effective email program will only intensify.

Email tends to be a central channel for our clients, and it’s important for us as well, so it was top of mind as we considered new ways to incorporate AI into our toolkit.

After doing our research and comparing options, we recently onboarded an AI-based email marketing optimization tool called Seventh Sense, which uses machine learning to personalize email delivery times and, ultimately, increase open and click rates.

If you’re interested in a manageable, cost-effective technology that can get you started with AI-based email marketing, read on.

The Case for Optimizing Send Times with AI

I’m not sure how many times I’ve searched for the “best days/times to send email for [insert industry],” but it’s too many. Do the search yourself and you’ll find the answers to be an unhelpful mix of “it depends,” “Tuesdays at 10am” or “definitely NOT Tuesdays at 10am.”

Good stuff!

Advice on suggested send times will ultimately hedge its bets with some obvious common sense: the best way to optimize for send time is by conducting tests and analyzing your contacts’ engagement to see when they tend to open and click emails.

This is true, but there are a few problems with this, namely:

• Humans aren’t great at this kind of analysis
• You have other time-sensitive stuff to do
• Your database is constantly changing
• There’s always the remote possibility that your database is not one homogenous block of people who all like reading their emails on the same days at the same times

So, what’s an email marketer to do?

Enter Artificial Intelligence

While humans may not be great at it, testing, analyzing and optimizing email engagement using data is exactly the type of task AI is suited for.

If we could improve email performance while freeing up the time that would go to manually testing and analyzing engagement trends for more strategic work, it’d be a clear win. And we could stop doing searches for the latest on the best days/times to send emails.

Of course, send time optimization is just one application of many within the AI-based email marketing category. For example, there are tools like Phrasee and Persado that use AI to craft and test different email subject lines and copy variants based on engagement data. The list is growing fast.

While we’ve got our eyes on some other tools in the market, for now we’re keeping the copywriting in human hands while we test AI on send time optimization.

About Seventh Sense

Seventh Sense struck us as a good fit because, in addition to having the features we were looking for and overwhelmingly positive customer reviews, the platform is built to optimize email delivery for HubSpot and Marketo. As a HubSpot agency partner, many of our clients use the platform for marketing and sales emails.

By integrating with HubSpot, Seventh Sense analyzes your contacts and their engagement to personalize and predict when they are most likely to read your email. Using machine learning, the tool continually tests and analyzes engagement data so that over time, open and click rates increases, your sender score improves and you get more results from your email campaigns.

Read the full article here.