Balancing all the emails your teams want to send to Prospects versus how many emails the Prospects want to receive is difficult.
Email your Prospects too often and they may opt out. Email them too little and they may miss the important updates they subscribed for.
Also, determining when to email your Prospects is always a struggle. Should you split your sends by time zones? Is there a sweet spot that covers most time zones? Does anyone actually read emails on Mondays?!
Up until now, the best way to tackle these decisions is Dynamic Frequency and Recency lists coupled with the numerous studies concerning which days and times are the best to send emails. However, with Pardot and Einstein, you can let machine learning do this analysis for you and have one less thing to think about.
Note: The 2 Einstein Solutions below are only available to Advanced and Premium Editions of Pardot.
Optimize your email send times
Pardot Einstein Send Time Optimization analyzes the timestamp of sends, opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and spam complaints to determine the optimal time to send a Prospect an email.
Keep in mind, Einstein Send Time Optimization includes List emails, Engagement Studio Program emails, and Salesforce Engage sends in its analysis. It does not include Operational emails or Autoresponders.
How Send Time Optimization works in the abstract is a little confusing, but this example from Salesforce’s help doc is great:
Send Time Optimization is only available in emails sent from the new MCAE (Pardot) Lightning Email Builder.
When sending a list email from the Lightning Builder, three Send Time options appear:
- Einstein Optimized (choose this option)
- Send Now
- Send Later
- For “Start Date” enter the earliest day you want the emails to go out.
- For “Time,” it takes about an hour for Einstein to analyze the prospects, so set this one hour before the earliest time your email should go out (i.e. If I want the emails to start sending at 9AM, I’ll select 8AM).
- Then set your “Send Emails Within” value (up to 168 hours which is 7 days). The gray box at the bottom of the Send Time section will show the latest time your email can go out and will update as you change your “Send Emails Within” value.
Once your email starts sending, you can monitor how many emails have gone out anytime during the Send Time window by going to Pardot Email > Scheduled > All Scheduled Emails.
What data do you need?
Each Prospect needs to have engaged with an email in the last 90 days. If a Prospect is new or has not engaged within this window, Einstein will recommend an aggregate of your email engagement data.
Enabling Einstein Send Time Optimization
You’ll enable Einstein Send Time Optimization by going to Setup > Einstein Pardot > Send Time Optimization.
Once enabled, it will take up to 72 hours to analyze your data and create your custom model.
Use Einstein Send Time Optimization to customize email frequency
Einstein Engagement Frequency (EEF) analyzes Prospect’s email engagement over the last 90 days plus their overall engagement data in the past 28 days to determine if the Prospect is Undersaturated, On Target, or Saturated.
Similar to Einstein Send Time Optimization, EEF analyses List emails, Engagement Studio Program emails, and Salesforce Engage sends. It does not include Operational emails or Autoresponders.
So, say for example you have a list of 100 Prospects who all received an email two days ago. You need to send all 100 another email, but you are worried about over emailing them. With EEF, you can run a dynamic list looking at your Recipient list from your first email and see which Prospects are Undersaturated or On Target and could be emailed again.
Or, even better, you could set up an Engagement Studio Program for the second email, and any future communications, to wait for the Prospect’s EEF status to change from Saturated.
What data do you need?
Each Prospect needs to have engaged in at least the last 28 days, but 90 days is recommended. EEF also requires 5+ variations of emails be sent to at least 10 Prospects within the last 28 days.
Enabling EEF
You’ll enable Einstein Send Time Optimization by going to Setup > Einstein Pardot > Einstein Engagement Frequency.
Once enabled, it will take up to 72 hours to analyze your data and create your custom model, a new Prospect default field, Einstein Engagement Frequency, will also be created.
Lean on the machines with Einstein Send Time Optimization
With Einstein Send Time Optimization and Einstein Email Frequency, we can begin leaning on machine learning to make some of the email sending decisions for us.
If you’ve already started using these two Einstein tools with Pardot, please share your tips, tricks, and findings in the comments!
