Send Time Optimization

Send Time Optimization is an Iterable AI tool that helps you send email and push notifications right when your contacts are most likely to open and read them. For each of a campaign's recipients, it uses machine learning to analyze historical engagement behavior and select an optimal, per-person send time.

For email campaigns, Send Time Optimization attempts to maximize the Email Open Rate (Unique Email Opens or Clicks / Total Emails Delivered) and Email Click Rate (Unique Email Clicks / Total Emails Delivered) metrics.

For push notification campaigns, it tries to maximize the Push Open Rate (Unique Pushes Opened / Total Pushes Delivered) metric.

# Overview

As you're using Send Time Optimization, remember that:

• STO optimizes send times based on project-specific data. It does not analyze cross-project data for the same contact.
• Optimized send times always fall at the top of the hour.
• STO uses a 50/50 control/variation split for Send Time Optimization experiments. This is not adjustable.
• For users with insufficient historical project data from which to derive optimized send times, Iterable sends campaigns at their configured send times (even if you've enabled Send Time Optimization).
• Iterable updates its Send Time Optimization machine learning models once per week, using the newest available data for each project and weighting recent data more heavily. All models are updated over the course of the week and not on any set schedule.
• STO does not guarantee higher engagement.
• A rate limit associated with a campaign may cause the campaign to send some messages outside of the STO window. (Rate limits are a beta feature; talk to your Iterable customer success manager to enable them.)

# STO updates for Apple Mail on iOS 15+

We've updated our Send Time Optimization feature to account for Mail Privacy Protection in iOS 15.

As Send Time Optimization generates optimal send time predictions, it now ignores all email events coming from Apple Mail on iOS 15 (events received on or after September 1, 2021).

More specifically, it ignores email events with user agent string Mozilla/5.0, which is associated with Apple Mail on iOS 15.

# Learn more

To learn more about Send Time Optimization, read:

• Creating Blast Campaigns
• Send Time Optimization Experiments
• Creating Triggered Campaigns
• Using Send Time Optimization with Workflows