Power a smarter sending strategy with your customer data
Marketers often wonder what time of day will yield the best results for their email campaigns. Instead of poring through industry blogs and relying on generalized guidance, why not use your own customer data to find the answer? Run an AI-powered Smart Send Time test in Klaviyo to find the optimal email send time for your own unique audience.
Learn more about how the Smart Send Time test works in the video below.
Note: In order to run a Smart Send Time test, you need to include a minimum of 12,000 recipients in your exploratory sends. If you don't have at least 12,000 profiles who have consented to receive marketing emails in Klaviyo, you will not be able to run a Smart Send Time test.
Get the best results from your Smart Send Time test
In order to get the most out of your Smart Send Time tests, you’ll want to create the most stable test conditions possible. This means holding as many variables steady as you can so you can isolate the true impact of send time. Follow the tips below for the best results:
Send during a stable period of traffic
When planning your test, choose a period of time within your calendar where you expect traffic on your website to be relatively stable. Don’t run Smart Send Time tests on or around holidays that are popular for shopping, or during known peaks in your season as customers will behave differently during these periods than they otherwise would. Try to test during a period of time that is considered “normal” for your brand.
Don’t test time-sensitive messages
Remember, Smart Send Time tests occur over a period of time. You can pick and choose which campaigns are included in your test. Only include campaigns in a Smart Send Time test if they are not time sensitive.
We recommend including content such as featured product or best-seller reminders, blog content, social proof, or any editorial-type content that is not deadline-driven. Do not include flash-sale campaigns, event invitations, or deadline-based messages in a Smart Send Time test.
Turn Smart Sending off for messages in your test
Smart Sending (not to be confused with a Smart Send Time test) is a feature in Klaviyo that helps you avoid overwhelming customers with messages. When you toggle this feature on, profiles who received a message within your Smart Sending window will be skipped over and will not receive the campaign.
If you are going to include an email in a Smart Send Time test, make sure that Smart Sending is turned off because you want as large of a sample audience as possible to be included in the test.
Don’t alter your normal sending cadence
While it can be tempting to increase your campaign volume in order to get through a Smart Send Time test faster, this could actually skew your results. Remember, you are trying to hold everything steady except for the send time of your message to hone in on the optimal time.
Stick to your regular campaign sending cadence, and identify which messages within your normal schedule would be good candidates for the test based on how urgent they are.