Send Time AI is a messaging engagement tool that leverages Attentive AI™️ to identify the time of day each unique subscriber is most likely to engage with a message. When you enable Send Time AI for a campaign, messages aren’t sent in a batch to all of your subscribers at the same time. Instead, message send times are individualized for each of your subscribers and messages are delivered throughout the day on your behalf.
Send Time AI is part of the suite of tools available with AI Pro. If you’re interested in using Send Time AI and other AI Pro tools to maximize revenue and boost ROI, sign up and learn more about Attentive AI or reach out to your Attentive CSM.
Use Send Time AI for a campaign message
- Go to Campaigns and click + Create campaign.
- Choose Text, Email, or A/B test.
- Complete the following:
- Message name: Enter an internal name for the first message of your campaign.
- Tags: Click Add tags and select an existing tag or type a name to create a new tag. You can add up to five tags per campaign message. Learn more about campaign message tags.
- Audience: Click Edit and select one or more segments of subscribers to receive your campaign. You can also click Exclude to further refine the audience of your campaign. You can see an estimate of message recipients for your message above the Done button. See Select and target audiences for campaigns for more information.
- When to send: Choose a date and then select Use Send Time AI if it's not already selected.
- Message: Design your text or email message.
- Click Review & schedule campaign.
- Click Send test message, enter your mobile number, and then click Send test.
- Review your message for:
- Audience targeting and send time
- Message copy grammar and style
- Media, personalizations, and shortlinks
- When you’re finished, click Schedule campaign.
Your campaign is now scheduled, and you can find it to edit, pause, or cancel it on the Campaigns page by filtering for Scheduled campaigns.
As with other campaigns, you can pause and edit campaigns with Send Time AI right up until they’re sent to subscribers.
After your campaign ends, you can review its performance by filtering on the Campaigns page for Delivered campaigns.
How Send Time AI determines send times
Send Time AI helps you schedule your campaign messages based on your brand’s historical campaign performance and subscriber-specific information in combination with anonymized platform data. It takes into account your subscribers’ locations and your brand's Quiet Hours to respect quiet hours in each subscribers’ known local time.
Subscriber location
Send Time AI uses your subscribers’ recent location and region to determine which time zone is most appropriate to send messages.
- Recent location is the most recent location of a user, based on interaction with a message when available. A subscriber can have an unknown recent location if they haven’t interacted with any messages.
- Region is the country of the subscriber obtained at sign-up.
- Both recent location and region are visible for each subscriber in their subscriber profile.
Quiet hours for SMS
If you use Attentive’s default Quiet Hours (8 PM to 12 PM):
- For subscribers with a known recent location, Send Time AI messages will be sent at an optimized time between 8 AM to 8 PM in the time zone of the subscriber’s recent location.
Example: If your subscriber’s recent location is Seattle, then Send Time AI will find an optimized time between 8 AM to 8 PM Pacific Time. - For subscribers with an unknown recent location, Send Time AI messages will be sent at an optimized time before 8 PM in the easternmost time zone of the subscriber's region. This is so that subscribers don’t receive messages too late in the day.
Example: If the subscriber’s region is the United States, then Send Time AI messages will be sent before 8 PM Eastern Time.
If you have custom Quiet Hours (e.g., 4 PM to 11 AM):
- For subscribers with a known recent location, Send Time AI SMS messages will observe your brand’s custom Quiet Hours in the time zone of the subscriber’s recent location.
Example: If your custom Quiet Hours are 4 PM to 11 AM, and your subscriber’s recent location is Seattle, then Send Time AI will find an optimized send time between 11 AM and 4 PM Pacific Time. - For subscribers with an unknown recent location, Send Time AI messages will be sent before the start of Quiet Hours in the easternmost time zone of the subscriber's region. This is so that subscribers don’t receive messages too late in the day.
Example: If custom Quiet Hours are 4 PM to 11 AM, and the subscriber’s region is the United States, then Send Time AI messages will be sent before 4 PM Eastern Time. - Quiet Hours settings only apply to for SMS messages. They don't apply to email messages.
Send times for email (beta only)
Send Time AI emails are sent to your subscribers at their optimized time within their time zone. There are no quiet hours limitations, because Quiet Hours settings don't apply to email.
For subscribers with an unknown recent location, Send Time AI emails are sent at 12 PM Eastern Time.
Scheduled date and same-day sends
When you schedule a campaign with Send Time AI, messages can only be sent during that calendar day in your company’s time zone. Quiet Hours for SMS are respected in your subscriber’s local time zone as described above.
Campaigns Scheduled before the send date
Campaigns scheduled before the send date have the full 24 hours to be sent to eligible subscribers, respecting Quiet Hours in their local time zone as described above.
- Beginning at 12:00 AM Eastern Time on August 7th, Send Time AI looks for subscribers with an optimized Send Time that are eligible to receive messages until August 8th at 12:00 AM Eastern Time.
- For subscribers with a known recent location in Eastern Time:
- They can begin receiving messages at 8:00 AM Eastern Time on August 7th.
- They won’t receive messages after 8:00 PM Eastern Time on August 7th.
- For subscribers with a known recent location in Hawaii time (which is 6 hours behind Eastern Time during daylight savings):
- They can begin receiving messages August 6th at 6:00 PM Hawaii Time. This is when the scheduled date in Eastern Time begins.
- They won’t receive messages between 8:00 PM Hawaii Time on August 6th, and 8:00 AM Hawaii Time on August 7th.
- They can receive messages again at 8:00 AM Hawaii Time on August 7th through 6:00 PM Hawaii Time on August 7th., when the scheduled date in Eastern Time ends.
- For subscribers with an unknown recent location and region in the United States, Send Time AI messages will be sent before 8 PM Eastern Time.
Campaigns scheduled on the same day as send date
If you schedule a same-day campaign, messages are sent immediately if subscribers’ AI-optimized send times have already passed. If you need to schedule a same-day send and want to use Send Time AI, we recommend logging in and scheduling the campaign before Quiet Hours for SMS begins.
Example: If your company uses the default Quiet Hours for SMS of 8 PM to 12 PM:
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If you log in and schedule a same-day campaign at 8 AM, then the same subscriber with an AI-optimized send time at 12 PM will be sent a message at 12 PM.
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If you log in and schedule a same-day campaign at 4 PM, then a subscriber with an AI-optimized send time at 12 PM will be sent a message at 4 PM.
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If you log in and schedule a same-day campaign at 9 PM, then a subscriber with an AI-optimized send time at 12 PM will receive the message at 9 PM.
Send Time AI best practices
We recommend running Send Time AI across a range of different campaigns to better understand performance. And the more you use Send Time AI, the more it learns about when your subscribers are most likely to engage with your messages.
Use Send Time AI for campaigns that aren’t time-sensitive. Campaigns that focus on selling items or driving traffic to your store are great candidates for optimization.
Don't use Send Time AI with campaigns that need to be delivered at specific times or campaigns that rely on urgency to drive traffic. For example, don’t use Send Time AI for campaigns about a flash sale that ends in 4 hours.