Predictive Send Time Optimization with Adobe Campaign

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Predictive Send Time Optimization with Adobe Campaign by Tobias Lohmann (@Tobias_Lohmann) 

When getting ready for your daily commute, you want to be there at a certain time. Based on your past experiences you know when it’s time to leave the house and hit the road. To arrive at the desired time, you need to consider things like traffic jams on the route, crowded parking spots, possibly having to refuel, and other obstacles that influence the arrival time.

Now imagine planning this individually for your family, friends, or even the whole city. Sounds impossible, right? Well, that’s exactly what marketers need to achieve every day.

Tobias Lohmann, Senior Consultant in the Adobe Professional Services Team, explains how Brands can deliver marketing messages to individual customers at the very best moment using the power of artificial intelligence.

What is the best moment to send an email?

Everyone has a different pattern of interacting with email; some prefer checking for new messages first thing in the morning, others in between or in the evening. In addition, there might be different interaction patterns, like when someone reads through an email or clicks on the links contained.

Brands need to find a way to deliver each message at that moment when the (individual) user is most likely to engage with the content and ultimately perform the desired marketing action to increase the conversion rate.

From email personalization to 1:1 communication

Personalization in marketing communication is not new: Adobe Campaign offers a broad set of content personalization like personalized greetings, design optimizations, or offers that are most appealing to the individual customer.

However, email communications are still sent as a one-time blast toward the target group.

To deliver an even more convenient experience, we strongly recommend that Marketers also need to add the “When” to their campaigns.

With the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning, Adobe Campaign can now deliver messages even to large audiences just in time for the individual recipient. This can significantly increase the chance customers will see it on top of the inbox stack when they’re ready to interact with it.

Predicting the future by learning from the past

Adobe Professional Services can help brands enhance their Adobe Campaign setup with a feature called “Predictive send time optimization”. Predictive send time optimization turns historic data into individual scores by using Journey AI. With the power of Artificial Intelligence Journey AI features a set of machine learning models that will calculate the best time for each recipient to open, click or engage with your email.

How does this it work in detail? Whenever marketing sends a delivery to a target group in Adobe Campaign it will keep the interactions for each recipient in a delivery and tracking log. These existing logs will be anonymously processed by Journey AI and it will return

• the best time on each day of the week,
• the best day in the week and
• the best time on the best day of the week

for each recipient. The result will be fed back to Adobe Campaign and stored on each recipient.

To get the best result, we recommend to use at least 6 months of log data for the calculation …. the last six months of log data will be used for calculation and the scores will be updated regularly. This ensures that there’s always valid information available, even if a person changes their way of interacting with email.

The scores are calculated anonymously by only sending the necessary open and click counts and the Campaign internal recipient id to Journey AI. That way Journey AI does not receive any PII data and private data stays always protected in Campaign. Upon score ingestion, the results are reconciled back with existing recipients based on the recipient id.

Finally using a targeting workflow, the target group will be split according to the recipients’ send time optimization settings and will be scheduled for the perfect moment.

Just like someone regularly commuting and learning over time when to start to arrive in time, Campaign now has the power through Journey AI to serve brand communication to customers right on time, based on individual usage patterns.

Our Adobe Professional Services team can assist you in setting up this enhancement to unleash the power that lies inside your existing data and further optimize your marketing communication.

Want to learn more about how Adobe Professional Services can help you with your customer journey? Click here.

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