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Smart send time delivers a campaign to each contact at the hour they usually open or click your marketing email. Someone who reads at 7:00 gets it at 7:00, someone who reads in the evening gets it in the evening. You choose when the sending starts and how long it may take, and InstantCampaign spreads the campaign over that window. Automations have the same option on the Send Email step.

How InstantCampaign learns each person’s hour

InstantCampaign looks at each contact’s opens and clicks of your marketing email over the last 90 days:
  • Only real opens count. Opens by security scanners and other machines are left out.
  • A click counts twice as much as an open.
  • Recent activity counts more. An open from a month ago counts half as much as one from today.
  • Transactional email (receipts, password resets) is left out.
The hour with the most activity becomes the contact’s best hour. A contact needs at least three opens’ worth of activity before InstantCampaign trusts an hour for them. The hours are learned by the same run that computes predictive scores, so they refresh with the scores. To refresh them now, click Recompute on the tier strip on the Contacts page. Predictive scores are on the Essential plan and above. On other plans no hours are learned, and every contact is sent at your workspace’s peak hour or at the start time (see below).

Send a campaign at each person’s best time

  1. Open the campaign and start the send wizard.
  2. On the schedule step, choose Send at each person’s best time.
  3. Pick when sending starts (now, or a date and time) and how long the delivery window is: from 6 to 48 hours, 24 by default.
  4. Check the preview (below), then send.
Send at each contact’s local time is a different mode, and you can use only one of the two. See A/B testing and scheduling.

Who is sent when

Each contact is sent at the first hour that fits, in this order:
  1. Their own hour, if it falls inside your window.
  2. Your workspace’s peak hour, the hour your contacts open most, if it falls inside the window. Your workspace needs at least 20 opens and clicks in the last 90 days for this.
  3. The start time.
Nobody is left out. A new contact with no history is still sent, at the peak hour or at the start. For example, you start at 9:30 with a 24-hour window. A contact whose hour is 10:00 gets the email at 10:30 today. A contact whose hour is 8:00 gets it at 8:30 tomorrow, because 8:00 today was before the start. The minutes always follow the start time. With a short window, fewer people can be sent at their own hour. With 6 hours from 9:30, only hours from 9:00 to 15:00 fit, and everyone else falls back to the peak hour or the start time.

The preview

Before you send, the wizard shows a strip of 24 bars, one per hour, with how many people will get the email at each hour. Below it a sentence gives the split, for example “61% own hour · 30% workspace peak 10:00 UTC · 9% start time”. If most people land on the start time, your contacts do not have much history yet, or the window is too short for their hours.

Later hours and scheduled sending

The campaign is split into one delivery per hour. The deliveries due at the start go out at once. The later ones go out through scheduled sending, like a campaign scheduled for later. If scheduled campaigns do not go out in your workspace yet, the later hours of a smart-timed send wait too.

In an automation

On a Send Email step, turn on Wait for the contact’s best hour (max 24 h). When a contact reaches the step, InstantCampaign holds the email until their next best hour and then sends it. It waits at most 24 hours. The email goes out straight away when the contact has no learned hour yet, or when it is already their hour. The step waits only once.

Read the results

A smart-timed campaign has a Smart timing badge on its card and in the calendar. On the campaign page, the Smart timing section compares the people sent at a learned hour with the people sent at a fixed time: recipients, delivered, opened and clicked. It also lists the counts per hour. Keep these in mind when you read it:
  • The per-hour counts are by the hour the email was sent, not the hour it was opened.
  • With fewer than 100 recipients on either side, the section says there is too little to compare.
  • This is a comparison of what happened, not a controlled test. The two groups differ in more ways than timing, so treat a difference as a hint, not proof.

Why the hours are in UTC

Every hour in smart send time is shown in UTC. InstantCampaign learns when a person opens, not where they live, so it never uses the time zone on their profile. If someone opens at 7:00 UTC, the email goes out at 7:00 UTC, whether their profile says London, New York or nothing at all. That also covers people who travel, or whose time zone was never filled in. To find your own time, add or subtract your offset from UTC. In winter, London is UTC and New York is UTC − 5.