With Klaviyo there’s no more guessing when to send your email campaigns

best time to send email

Exciting times for savvy email ecommerce marketers. Today Klaviyo have released an insightful new tool Send Time Optimization that will allow you to ensure your email newsletters land in your subscriber’s inbox at the most opportune time.

Everyone has an opinion on when to best dispatch email newsletters, now, you can be data-informed on what works best for YOUR ecommerce brand.

Before now to gain any insight into when best to send email campaigns you would run a continuous series of timed-tests to shift away from the ‘hunch’ (eg. what you’d think the best time to be…).

Now, the machines do the learning for you.

Data-driven email dispatch times

With Klaviyo’s new functionality we’re looking specifically at email open-times (not purchase or click data). Your first email campaign using Send Time Optimisation will spread the delivery of subscriber emails across a 24hour period. Data will then be collected to pinpoint the optimised time for future campaigns.

The real value of data-informed decision making

There’s still a long way to go. Especially when you consider the importance of user-based, rather than list-based, data.

The progress being made by Klaviyo to enable data-informed insight is exciting. I still see (and listen to) far too many conversations taking place where opinions are aired with little to no substance with regard to the ‘best time’ to send campaigns.

Yes, you should send them consistently at a regular time (day of week). And, of course, there’s the belief you want to hit people at a time when you can gain their attention with ease.

A lot of the time we’re still working with insight gathered from years past – when our vision of the subscriber was sat at a desk in front of their computer. Those days are gone.

For the most part your emails are first read on the phone. Where filters dictate whether your subscriber is notified and also which folder on their phone your email will arrive in.

Without individual subscriber data we do need to work on a ‘best fit’ for your email subscriber list. This latest launch from Klaviyo will help you achieve that best fit.

The importance of list size in depending the right time to send your newsletter

You need a 12k+ database to gather time-based insight

Currently, you need a minimum of 12,000 subscribers in order to make use of this new Klaviyo feature. Anything less and the data pot is too small to make any informed decision upon.

Once exploratory sending is complete you’ll receive a breakdown report details the success of your campaign in 3-hour incremental windows:

send time optimisation

For future campaigns you’ll be given the option to send at the recommended new time interval based on the exploratory findings. It may up to 5 exploratory campaigns for you to be given decisive data to work from.

Whilst we’re not, yet, at the stage of minute-by-minute, subscriber-by-subscriber, analysis, the current methods help establish a shift from hunch-based intuition to data-informed knowledge.

This is a step forward and step we all, as data-informed, technology-driven marketers need to be taking.

Klaviyo is my go-to platform for email marketing for ecommerce brands of all sizes. You can register for a free trial here. Any questions regarding using Klaviyo, just give me a shout.


Written By:
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Ian Rhodes

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First employee of an ecommerce startup back in 1998. I've been using building and growing ecommerce brands ever since (including my own). Get weekly growth lessons from my own work delivered to your inbox below.

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