Use Klaviyo to power smarter sending
Timing is paramount when it comes to sending campaign content. Your goal should be to send messages when the majority of your audience is most engaged and thus more likely to click, convert, and make your client money.
So… when is the right time? The short answer: this depends on the channel you send with and the brand community you are targeting.
That said, here are a few quick tips by channel:
- Email: According to Klaviyo's business insights, Thursday and Friday afternoons (e.g., 12-2 p.m.) tend to be the optimal time for email deliverability, resulting in the highest engagement.
- Text messages: Similarly, based on studies assembled by Simple Texting, the best day to send texts is either Thursday, Friday, or Saturday between 12-2 p.m. or after-work hours (6-8 p.m.).
- Push: Push timing differs slightly as alerts should be sent when they are most relevant, particularly if they are time-sensitive or relate to a required in-app action. Otherwise, defer to text messaging best practices since they align with when your audience is most active on their phones.
With that in mind, let’s dive into 3 tools that Klaviyo offers to simplify this process for you and your clients, such as:
Smart send time
Smart Send Time is an email-specific tool, allowing you to determine when your client’s audience is most likely to open and click an email. If you have never run this test for your client before, start with a wide-reaching but not time-bound campaign, like the brand’s email newsletter.
The Smart Send Time test will then run in 3 phases:
- Exploratory: Send the first email to customers, in which Klaviyo will randomly select a send time within a 24-hour period to see which drives the highest engagement.
- Focused: Validate the send time results from the exploratory phase by sending an email at that optimal time as well as 2 hours before and 2 hours after to monitor how engagement varies in this timeframe.
- Optimal: Once the best time has been discovered, you can send messages at the time that leads to the highest conversions (in the recipient's local timezone).
Follow steps to perform a Smart Send Time test.
Your clients often have more than one distinct audience. Since the best time to send to one group may not be the best for another, you can run a Smart Send Time test for each grouping.
Note: Smart Send Time is only available for accounts with at least 12,000 active profiles and for campaigns with at least 12,000 recipients. If the sample size is too low, Klaviyo will not be able to accurately determine the best send time, so it’s important to grow your client's list before using this feature.
Smart Sending
With Smart Sending enabled, you can easily avoid over-sending across channels. How? This setting, which can be toggled on for both campaigns and each individual message in a flow, will limit the amount of emails, text messages, or mobile push notifications that can be sent in a given timeframe.
The default Smart Sending windows vary by channel, as shown below:
- Email: 16 hours
- Text: 24 hours
- Push: 24 hours
Thus, if someone already received a message in the window of time listed above, they will automatically be skipped from receiving any other that is scheduled to send. Only turn this off when it is crucial that every recipient receives that message.
Quiet Hours
Be respectful of your audience when scheduling your text messages and push notifications. In particular, be mindful of text messaging quiet hours, which are times of day that you should not send at as they are either early morning or late at night.
Here’s how to abide by quiet hours when sending a:
- Campaign: Avoid scheduling any text messages and push campaigns between 8 p.m.–11 a.m. in the recipient’s local timezone.
- Flow: Enable Quiet Hours for either the entire flow or individual messages. That way, recipients will move into the Waiting queue if a text was about to send any time between 8 p.m. to 11 a.m. Then, your client’s message will be sent at the next available send time outside of quiet hours.