Journeys let you send the right message to the right user at the right time, and Studio includes tools that make that easy. Here are a few tips for increasing engagement and conversions in your journey campaigns.
# In this article
# Optimize send times
Your users are diverse—they all have individual habits and preferences, including when they like to receive messages from your brand. Journeys can automatically send messages at the ideal time for each one of your users!
Send Time Optimization (STO) uses AI to analyze each user's past engagement behavior (within the same Iterable project), then sends the message at the time when they're most likely to open it.
You can enable STO in Email and Push journey tiles to improve these campaign metrics:
- Email Open Rate (Unique Email Opens or Clicks / Total Emails Delivered)
- Email Click Rate (Unique Email Clicks / Total Emails Delivered)
- Push Open Rate (Unique Pushes Opened / Total Pushes Delivered)
To turn on STO for a journey campaign, open the tile settings menu and check the Send Time Optimization box. Enter the maximum number of hours that you want Iterable to wait to send the message after a user arrives in the tile (between 6 and 24 hours).
# Sending STO-enabled messages
STO sends campaigns from a journey as described here:
STO sends messages based on the Complete Within value you provide, starting when a user enters the journey. For example, if a user enters a journey at 7:05 a.m. and the send is scheduled to complete within 5 hours, STO will determine the optimal time for the user between 7:05 a.m. and 12:05 p.m. Until the ideal send time arrives, the user remains in the journey tile.
If there isn't enough historical send data for a user when they reach a message tile that uses STO, they'll receive the campaign immediately.
Disabling a journey that has STO enabled doesn't prevent queued messages from being sent.
If a user satisfies exit criteria in a journey that has STO enabled, the message will still be sent at the optimized time chosen by STO, even though the user exited the journey.
To learn more, see Send Time Optimization.
# Turn on Quiet Hours
Your users may love your brand, but they probably don't want to hear from you while they're trying to sleep! Receiving a marketing message at an inconvenient time is frustrating, which can lead to lower engagement or, even worse, cause users to unsubscribe.
You can set quiet hours in your journey campaigns to make sure your users only receive messages from the journey at times that are convenient for them.
When a user reaches a message tile that uses Quiet Hours, Iterable checks the time in the user's local time zone before sending the message. If the user reaches the message tile during the campaign's quiet hours window, they'll remain in that journey tile until they're eligible to receive the campaign.
IMPORTANT
Iterable has to know each user's time zone in order to pause campaign sends
during your quiet hours windows. If any of your users don't have the timeZone
field set on their user profile, they'll receive the campaign as soon as they
reach the message tile. Before using Quiet Hours in your journey campaigns, make
sure all of the users who may go through the journey have a timeZone field set
on their user profile.
To turn on Quiet Hours for one of your journey campaigns, open the tile settings menu and check the Use quiet hours box. Enter the hours that you want to prevent the campaign from being sent to your users.
NOTE
If you turn on Quiet Hours and STO for a campaign, and the ideal send time for a user falls within your Quiet Hours window, your send won’t be optimized, it will be held until the Quiet Hours window ends. For example, if STO selects 5:00 a.m. as the ideal send time, but Quiet Hours is set from 9:00 p.m. to 9:00 a.m., the campaign will be sent at 9:00 a.m.
# Optimize your campaign content
Stuck between two great subject line ideas? Try them both!
You can add experiments to message tiles to test different versions of campaigns.
When you add an experiment to a journey campaign, the journey will send multiple variations of the campaign's message, measure how well each version performs, select a winner, and then use the winning variation for all remaining sends.
You can set up experiments to test a campaign's:
- Subject line
- Preheader text
- From name and sender
- Message body
- Send time (if your project has enough historical send data)
- Full contents
To add an experiment to a journey campaign, open the tile settings menu, scroll down to the Experiment header, and click Create A/B Experiment. This will open the Experiments page in a new tab, where you can set up and launch your experiment.
For more details on how to set up an experiment, read our experiments documentation.
# Measure your results
You can track the results of your optimized campaigns and experiments in a couple of ways.
To see if a particular campaign's performance has improved, click View analytics at the bottom of the message tile on the canvas (or at the bottom of the tile settings menu). This will take you to the Campaign Analytics page for your campaign, where you can analyze delivery rates, audience retention, heatmaps, and more.
To see how a campaign experiment is performing, open the tile settings menu for the campaign and click Analytics under the Experiment header. This will take you to the Experiment Analytics page, where you can check the status of your experiment and see which variation performed best.
You can also generate reports for journeys. Navigate to Insights > Reports. From here, you can select the metrics you're interested in and set a date range that includes before and after you optimized your journey campaigns.
To learn more about monitoring and analyzing journey campaign performance, see: