How to find the best sending times specific to your audience?

A few of our competitors offer "machine learning" and "AI" to decide when the best time to send to your audience is.

We've always thought this was a load of nonsense especially when those same companies try to predict your sending times before you've even drafted your first email. They are basing a lot of their predictions on their network and not on your specific sites which can lead to problematic recommendations.

So, in Bento, we offer a smarter way to run your own tests where you control every aspect of your data and results.

Introducing: the sending time test - a simple name with an even simpler testing methodology.

This is a manual test that is run over a long time period, say 7 to 14 days, right inside your Bento account and allows you to stretch out a broadcast over any time period you'd like. 7 days, 14 days, 2 months, whatever!

After the test you'll be able to visualize the exact best time to send based on your data.

How to setup your manual test

First, we want to create a new broadcast in your account, add some content, and then calculate the hourly rate you're going to configure the email to be delivered at.

We get this figure by dividing your total subscribers by 168 (7 days x 24 hours). If you are a monk with a lot of patience you could decrease the amount to 84 which would send the email over two weeks which would give you a better picture of the best day to send at.

For example: if you have a list the size of 20,000 you'll get something like ~120 per hour.

Once you've added that number to your broadcast queue it up and begin sending.Your email will now be evenly split out over the time period you specified.

Every hour 168 people will get your email and engage with it.

After 7 days has elapsed you'll then be able to view a detailed graph which shows a breakdown, by hour, of all your engagement metrics.

In this graph, look for periods of higher opens and clicks.

Here's an example of a customer who ran one over a 3 day period:

In this graph it clearly shows that the best time to send is between 10am to 1PM UTC time with the best day on Thursdays. This makes sense for this customer as most of their audience work 9 to 5 and take lunch breaks to scan their emails.

The competitor that this customer moved from used to tell them that the best time to send was at 9am to 10am — completely incorrect when you look at this data and other experiments they've run on their Bento account.

I have a feeling that you'll be shocked when you run this test and see your results come back.

It's always been mindblowing for us.

Any questions? Just ask in Discord.