I plan to use STO in a journey which sends a new email every day for 10 days. If I use STO on Day 6 and set the time frame for 24 hours for the test, how does it affect the rest of the journey? Will some customers then receive two emails on Day 7? Do I need to add an extra day to wait following Day 6?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Samantha
#Einstein Send Time Optimization #Marketing Cloud #Trailhead
Hi Samantha!
Einstein STO is basically a modified wait activity in your journey. So think of it the same way--if you set your window to a full 24 hours, then you have to assume that some of your contacts making their way through the journey would wait that full time before receiving the email. Depending on when contacts are being injected into your journey, you might consider changing the wait activity prior to the STO to be a shorter timespan than 1 day, or reducing the STO timespan to ensure that it will happen in the same day (a recent journey I worked on injected contacts daily at 6AM, and had a twelve hour STO from 7am-7pm.
Salesforce recommends using a random audience split prior to your STO so that you can measure results--and in their example here, they recommend combining a wait with a STO if you have a minimum one-day wait between email sends:
"To optimize send times when there’s a minimum one-day wait between email messages in a customer journey, combine a wait activity and the Einstein STO activity.
Northern Trails Outfitters (NTO) marketing manager, Lisa, wants to optimize customer engagement for a welcome campaign. After customers subscribe to the NTO newsletter, they receive a series of three emails that set expectations and highlight the benefits of subscribing. Before the second and third messages, Lisa has included a wait activity that instructs the system to wait two days before sending the next message. To ensure that an email is sent to each subscriber when that subscriber is most likely to engage with it, Lisa adds the Einstein STO activity between the wait activity and email activity for the second and third messages.
A customer named Alice and a customer named Bjorn both subscribe to the newsletter on a Tuesday. They each receive the initial welcome message within a few minutes. Remember, the journey doesn’t include an Einstein STO activity before this message. So the message sends when Alice and Bjorn reach the first email activity in the journey. The second message is scheduled to send on Thursday. Based on Alice’s individual subscriber engagement behavior over the past 90 days, the journey sends the second message to Alice at 11:00 AM. Based on Bjorn’s engagement history, the journey sends the message to Bjorn at 7:00 PM."
Be sure to test your solution to make sure that you're seeing the results that you're expecting to see!
