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Are You Sure This Is The Best Timing For That?

By Ramita Rajaa
  • UPDATED: 16 November 2023
  • 5 minread
Are You Sure This Is The Best Timing For That?

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Imagine how awkward it would be if you accidentally sent your customers a “good morning” text at 9 PM on a Friday. Or a “Bon Appetit!” email at 4 AM. Confusing, right? Your customers would probably be annoyed at the irrelevant messages. This is what happens when your marketing campaigns aren’t delivered at the right time to your customers.

But how do you figure out when is the best time to send an email, push notification, or SMS? Is it the same time for all customers? Is it a separate time slot for a certain type of customer? Or a different one for each customer, in which case the logistics seem impossible to achieve?

🎁 Here’s a gift for you: One infographic on the Best Time to Send feature 🎉

What if an Algorithm Took Care of This Decision For You?

MoEngage’s revolutionary Best Time to Send technology can now automatically decide the optimal time to send emails, push notifications, SMS marketing campaigns, and more!

This proprietary new algorithm has been featured in Lattice, the prestigious machine learning journal by the Association of Data Scientists. You can get in touch with the MoEngage team to see how this will work for you.

In this blog, we’re going to explore how this technology has helped brands increase conversion rates by up to 64%!

Is it Ever The Worst Time to Send Messages?

Optimize marketing goals for high open rates compared to industry average for most engagement

You might not agree with us on this one right away—but we’ll change your mind: Any messages that aren’t sent at the right time have been sent at the worst time. Why?

Firstly, consumers get irritated with irrelevant messages, especially when they’re delivered at the wrong time. If brands send badly timed messages too often, consumers might mute notifications or churn.

You can’t blame them for it either—would you be happy if your phone dinged with emails about a discount on mango juice when you’re struggling to fall asleep?

This is an image of a consumer who is unhappy because they received a text at the wrong time.

Secondly, every marketing campaign expends resources, be it time, effort, or money. These resources would be wasted if the campaign’s performance wasn’t good enough.

Campaigns that are sent at a bad time see significantly lower email engagement rates, higher unsubscribe rates, and unimpressive click-through rates.

Figuring Out The Right Time to Send Anything

Is your brand still relying on a generic email blast sent to consumers at a fixed time, say 10 AM on a Wednesday? Does your brand instead decide the time to send each campaign based on the nature of the content? Both of these methods are flawed.

Generic Communication Does Not Work

The first technique is flawed because it is inefficient to send out generic marketing emails or campaigns that aren’t segmented for the right audience and personalized to their preferences.

Studies show that email marketing campaigns that have been segmented and personalized see up to 44X greater engagement and conversion rates.

This is an image of how email segmentation and personalization can increase click through rates by up to 44 times.

The same goes true for other marketing efforts such as push notifications, in-app messaging, WhatsApp messaging, or even a text message for an SMS campaign.

Marketer Bias Can Skew Your Experiment

The second technique is flawed because of something called marketer bias. Marketers tend to be biased toward decisions that confirm our preconceptions. As much as we try to step back and be objective about decisions, we’re only human, after all.

The only effective way to be truly objective about marketing decisions is to let the machine learn and make the decision for you.

The Solution

Knowing this, the data science team at MoEngage has devised an all-new way to determine the right time to send any campaign automatically, be it promotional emails, engagement notifications, push notifications, or others.

The Traditional Way to Solve This

Traditionally, marketers perform a statistical analysis of all times a consumer has interacted with the brand. Based on this data, you can heuristically mark out time slots during which the consumer has the highest engagement rates as compared to other time slots in the data period.

The problem with this, again, is marketer bias. The time slots defined by you might not be the ones ideal for the consumer.

This is an image depicting marketers trying to reach customers

Another drawback is that you might never explore all possible time intervals of a day while setting up the test campaigns.

While this can be countered by possibly sending out campaigns at all possible times and marking out the results, this is an expensive affair.

The Smart Way to Solve This

MoEngage’s proprietary Best Time to Send algorithm automatically determines consumer affinity toward a product.

This is an image of a happy consumer after a purchase

This affinity is mapped to consumer behavior, and the best time to send is calculated using the following technique:

  1. Compute the frequency of events performed by a consumer,
  2. Evaluate the likelihood of consumers to engage throughout the time period,
  3. Quantify the consistency of activity during the historical duration,
  4. Determine different weights to be assigned to each time period during the week,
  5. Create a weekday activation matrix that assigns values to each time period based on the previous parameters,
  6. Calculate the score for each hour based on the weekday activation matrix and the consistency of engagement observed.

Increase open rate for mobile users and desktop users on a campaign with best sending times

Does This Work?

Now that the technique is perfected, it’s time to start testing! (TL;DR, the MoEngage Best Time to Send algorithm, increases conversion rate by up to 64%.)

This is an image depicting 64% increase in CVR from MoEngage BTS

The data science team took the classic test + control approach to this. The team identified two segments of customers.

This is an image of experimentative test and control segments

The Test Segment

The first segment received an email campaign that was sent during the best times to send and best days to send.

The Control Segment

The second segment received this email campaign at time periods outside of those identified by the algorithm.

The results were clear. The highest open rates and engagement rates were observed in the segment that received the campaign at the right time.

Higher open rates directly lead to greater engagement, more conversions, and greater retention.

How to Schedule Campaigns Based on Best Time

MoEngage Best Time to Send is calculated separately for email campaigns, push notifications, and SMS marketing campaigns.

The best time value is an hourly bucket calculated at an individual consumer level.

Optimize your campaign with the right subject lines and best time

You can configure this option while creating your SMS, push, or email campaigns.

You can also create separate segments based on the best time to send value for a particular campaign.

Schedule appointment reminders in the best way to beat the competition and get good opens and clicks

This is a revolutionary new feature that can be applied to any campaign, be it a retention, engagement, upsell, or resell campaign. Click the button below to get a quick demo of this feature.

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About the author
Ramita Rajaa
Ramita Rajaa

Ramita is a content marketer with a knack for creative storytelling. She enjoys bridging the gap between people and brands through the power of language. When she isn't writing, she's either gaming, traveling, or playing fetch with her dog.

FAQs

What is MoEngage?

MoEngage is an insights-led customer engagement platform, trusted by more than 1,200 global consumer brands such as Ally Financial, McAfee, Flipkart, Domino’s, Nestle, Deutsche Telekom, OYO*, and more.

MoEngage empowers marketers and product owners with insights into customer behavior and the ability to act on those insights to engage customers across the web, mobile, email, social, and communication channels.

Consumer brands across 35 countries use MoEngage to power digital experiences for over 1 billion customers every month. With offices in ten countries, MoEngage is backed by Goldman Sachs Asset Management, B Capital, Steadview Capital, Multiples Private Equity, Eight Roads, F-Prime Capital, Matrix Partners, Ventureast, and Helion Ventures.

What is the best time to send a text?

No amount of research in the world can answer this question for your use case and brand.

Each brand is unique and every marketer’s needs are different.

This is where the MoEngage right time to send algorithm comes in.

We help you automatically figure out which are the right days to send texts.

The advantage of sending texts at the best times is telling your customers you care about them.

Once you’ve optimized your send time, you can build trust and expect greater engagement and conversions.

What is the best practice for email marketing?

It is estimated that email marketing delivers an ROI of $36 for every $1 spent. Email is a great way to reach your market; email subscribers are often your most vocal and loyal customers.

This is why it is crucial to invest in a good email marketing strategy.

A good email marketing strategy begins with good subject lines. Email marketers need to spend time understanding each consumer to see what works and what doesn’t.

Marketing emails with good subject lines see better open and click-through rates.

Email marketers must also avoid email blasts that target all mobile devices across different industries, which are often irrelevant to the reader.

Data shows that such emails sent at the worst times on the worst days deliver the lowest open rates.

This stands true for promotional emails as well.

The most appropriate time to send emails is different for each customer. It could depend on their own time zone and their working hours.

Emails send mid week might deliver the most traffic to some brands, but this peak time might not be the perfect time to send emails for other brands.

Marketers must avoid sending emails at these timings and must invest in optimizing timing for greater email marketing success.

Here’s a framework for value-drive email marketing strategies, email personalization, segmentation, deliverability, click analysis, and best practices. If you’re looking for benchmark metrics for email, you can head to this page. We’ve analyzed 5.3 billion emails to understand what works best, between segmentation, personalization, and journey-based marketing.

What is Push Amplification™?

Push Amplification™ is a revolutionary new technology pioneered by MoEngage which ensures that your push notifications get maximum deliverability on Android devices in Asia.

The Android market in Asia is highly fragmented with multiple operating systems and manufacturers. It is estimated that 40-70% of your push notifications go undelivered because devices get disconnected from Google’s push notification delivery service.

With MoEngage Push Amplification™, brands can make sure that push notifications are delivered to consumers at the perfect time, ensuring a high open rate and retention rate.

Push Amplification™ works to get exclusive access with the OEM’s (original equipment manufacturer) own push service system channel. This service always remains active and cannot be closed or killed by the consumer.

Push notifications are great tools for conversion and retention. Brands can reach consumers directly on their devices and ensure that their tools are always visible, always available for the consumers when they want it.

What is the right time to send web push notifications or in-app notifications?

All the research in the world cannot help you answer this question because every notification is personal and means something different to each consumer. The best day to send a notification would depend on the use case for each brand and the type of consumer segment targeted. A good marketing platform would have an intelligent assistant capable of automatically deducing the best send time without requiring the marketer to be spending time on this.

The first thing you can do after automatically deducing the best send times is to research the impact of the campaign. The kind of research required would be to understand the open rate, click to open rate, conversion rate, delivery rate, and unsubscribe rate.

Remember not to ignore unsubscribe rate as this is a very important retention metric. It directly signifies that consumers are unhappy with your brand’s communication. Marketers who find high unsubscribe rates from their research or campaigns must immediately take steps to reduce this and prevent future churn.

What is the best time to send push notification?

We’ve solved this million-dollar question with an intelligent assistant at MoEngage.

You can now identify the best send times without having to dig deeper into consumer behavior.

The intelligent algorithm will do this work for you!

By calculating the best day to send push notifications, brands can increase their conversion rate averages and shoot for the best results and most opens.