Why email timing matters
As a marketer, when your messages arrive can be almost as important as what they say. The best send time depends largely on your audience and industry. A clothing retailer might want to reach customers during evenings and weekends, when they're more likely to browse an email and visit the retailer's website. An education organization trying to reach teachers may prefer to send during the school day. A pizza chain might focus on Friday and Saturday evenings. There are also times when you may want to avoid sending. An email delivered at 2 a.m. could get lost among the recipient's morning messages. And if your email includes a direct call to action such as calling your business, you may not want it arriving when your staff isn't available. Dynamics 365 provides several features that can help you better control this timing.
Analyzing open times in Outbound Marketing
If you're still using Outbound Marketing, you can review when recipients have historically opened your emails. Open a live email, navigate to Insights, and look under Open Times. Here, you can see the days and times when recipients opened the email. Darker areas indicate times with more opens. This historical information can help you identify audience trends and determine when recipients may prefer to receive your emails.
Scheduling emails in Outbound Marketing
Outbound Marketing also lets you schedule an email directly from its email tile. Select the email tile, open the settings pane on the right, and choose Schedule. You can then specify the days and times when you want the email sent based on what you've learned from previous sends. If Automated scheduling is enabled through your feature switches, you can also turn it on and allow the system to analyze historical data and choose the send time it considers optimal. Setting quiet times in Real-Time Journeys Real-Time Journeys provides quiet times to prevent messages from being sent during periods when you don't want recipients to receive them. Navigate to Settings, then find Quiet time under the Customer Engagement section and create a new quiet time setting. There are two primary options:
- Weekly quiet hours
- Quiet dates
Creating weekly quiet hours
Weekly quiet hours let you define recurring periods when messages shouldn't be sent. Quiet hours can be configured separately for commercial and transactional purposes. For example, you may want to limit commercial marketing emails while allowing transactional messages to continue going out immediately. You can also select the channel the quiet hours apply to, including:
- Email
- Text messages
- Push notifications
- Custom channels
- All channels
After selecting a channel, choose Edit to configure your recurring quiet hours. For example, you could prevent commercial emails from being sent:
- All day Saturday and Sunday
- From midnight to 5 a.m. on weekdays
- From 6 p.m. to midnight on weekdays
With those settings in place, Real-Time Journeys will hold your emails on weekends and outside your chosen weekday sending hours.
Adding quiet dates
Quiet dates let you block specific dates rather than recurring weekly timeframes. You might use quiet dates for bank holidays when you don't want marketing emails going out. You could also use them when your organization has an all-hands event or retreat and your team won't be available to effectively follow up with recipients. Quiet dates take precedence over recurring quiet hours. If 3 p.m. on a Wednesday would normally be an acceptable send time but that particular Wednesday is configured as a quiet date, messages won't be sent.
Applying quiet times to your messages
After creating and saving a quiet time configuration, you can apply it across your existing journeys and messages or decide later where it should be used. Quiet time settings can also be assigned through a compliance profile. Once a quiet time configuration is connected to a compliance profile, messages using that profile will follow the associated quiet times. Quiet hours can vary between journeys because they follow the time zone configured for each journey. For example, messages associated with a U.S. Eastern Time journey can be held at different times than messages associated with a U.S. Central Time journey. You can also adjust quiet times for an individual message within a journey by selecting another quiet time setting or removing quiet times from that message entirely. When reviewing an active journey, you can see how many messages are currently being held because of quiet time settings.
Using frequency caps with quiet hours
Frequency caps complement quiet hours by controlling how many messages customers receive within a specified period. A customer may qualify for several journeys or campaigns running simultaneously. Without limits, that customer could receive too many messages in a short period of time. Frequency caps help you manage that communication volume. Quiet times and frequency caps function separately. When quiet time delays a message, the frequency cap is calculated based on when that message would be sent after being released. To configure a frequency cap, navigate to Settings, then Customer Engagement, and select Frequency Cap. Create a new cap, give it a name, and configure the limit you want to use. For example, you could limit your audience to receiving no more than one email per day. Even if a recipient qualifies for several active journeys, the frequency cap can help prevent them from receiving multiple emails from your organization that day.
Build a more thoughtful sending strategy
Send scheduling, quiet times, quiet dates, and frequency caps give you more control over when and how often customers receive your marketing messages. By combining audience insights with appropriate sending restrictions, you can avoid inconvenient delivery times, coordinate messages with staff availability, and reduce the risk of overwhelming customers who qualify for multiple campaigns.
