Recommended send time

Updated

When you send an email from an automation or a one-time send, Customer.io can recommend an appropriate send time based on your users’ time zones.

 Is Customer.io AI enabled?

You need to enable Customer.io AI in AI settings to use this feature—if you haven’t already. See our AI overview to learn more about how you can use AI in Customer.io.

How it works

When you set up a one-time send or an email in an automation, you can click Recommend send time to schedule the email to send at the best time for your audience.

To generate recommended send times, we use AI along with the content of your message and your audience’s time zone. The recommendation also sets a fallback send time, which we’ll use whenever we don’t know someone’s time zone.

flowchart LR z(Send message to profile)-->a a{Does timezone
attribute exist?} a--->|Yes|b(Send message in
customer time zone) a-.->|No|c{Does cio_timezone
attribute exist?} c-->|Yes|b c-.->|No|d(Send message in
fallback time zone)

 Recommended send times don’t account for holidays

Recommended send times help you send messages at the right times when users encounter a message, but they don’t account for holidays and other dates that might be special to your audience (like birthdays, anniversaries, etc.).

Capture your audience’s time zone

To take advantage of send time recommendations, you need to capture your audience’s time zone information. You can do this using our automatic geolocation data collection feature or by setting a timezone attributeA key-value pair that you associate with a person or an object—like a person’s name, the date they were created in your workspace, or a company’s billing date etc. Use attributes to target people and personalize messages. in one of our supported formats.

Anybody who doesn’t have a cio_timezone or timezone attribute set will get the message at the fallback time. If you’re not sure if profiles have a cio_timezone or timezone attribute, you can browse Profiles in your workspace.

In the Review step of a one-time send, click Recommend send time to schedule it to send at the best time for your audience. If you don’t see this setting, you may need to enable Customer.io AI features in your AI settings.

When we recommend a send time, you can click Why this send time? to get an explanation of why we recommended that time. You can also provide additional context to help us tune the recommendation to better suit your message and audience.

A newsletter with a review step. The recommended send time is selected.
A newsletter with a review step. The recommended send time is selected.

When you set up an email in an automation, open your message Settings and you’ll see a Recommended Send Time option. If you don’t see this setting, you need to enable Customer.io AI features in your AI settings.

  1. Click Recommend Send Time to schedule the email to send at the best time for your audience.
    An automation with a workflow containing a single email. The email is selected and shows the recommended send time options
    An automation with a workflow containing a single email. The email is selected and shows the recommended send time options
  2. Select the fallback time zone and then click the recommended option.
    An automation with a workflow containing a single email. The recommended send time is set and the cursor hovers over the weekday between 9 AM and 5 PM button
    An automation with a workflow containing a single email. The recommended send time is set and the cursor hovers over the weekday between 9 AM and 5 PM button
  3. (Optional) Click Why this send time? to get an explanation of why we recommended that time. You can also provide additional context to help us tune the recommendation to better suit your message and audience.

This creates a new Time Window step directly above the message in the workflow. This is how we manage time zone-based sending in an automation workflow. The Time Window step holds profiles in the automation until their recommended send time. When they fall into the recommended time window, they’ll get your message and continue through the automation.

If the profile is already in the time window when they reach that step, we’ll send the message immediately and they’ll continue through the automation. They don’t have to wait for the next time window.

An automation with a workflow containing a single email and a time window step above it representing the recommended send time
An automation with a workflow containing a single email and a time window step above it representing the recommended send time

 Set your messages to send automatically

If your messages are set to Queue Draft, we’ll queue your draft at the recommended send time but we won’t send it. That might defeat the purpose of using recommended send times. Make sure you set your messages to Send Automatically to take advantage of recommended send times.

You can edit the time window step directly. If you want to recommend a new time, you’ll need to delete the time window step above your message. Select your message, click Settings and then you can recommend a new send time.

When you recommend a new time, we’ll create a new Time Window step above your message.

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