We'll let you know how it goes in an upcoming blog post. In the meantime, I wanted to talk a little bit about one of the most interesting findings from some of the A/B tests we conducted in 2018.

Seventh Sense uses randomized send times to find the best time to email people who have never engaged before. But I often get the question, why don’t you send to these people at the top engagement time for my list of subscribers?

If we know that some times are better than others, why not start at those aggregate top times? 

The primary reason is that we’ve found randomization, or simply spreading out the delivery of email over a longer period of time, increases engagement more than sending at a list's top engagement time.

While email service providers are very secretive about their filtering processes, it’s likely that one of the factors used in identifying “bulk senders” is how many emails you're sending at a time. For this reason, simply throttling outbound email may help land more messages in the inbox.

The second reason is because despite their being a top engagement time for your list of email subscribers, that peak is still only the top time for a small fraction of your list, usually less than 7%. By randomizing your early mailings to new subscribers, Seventh Sense can build a better profile for each new person you add to your database.

If you're not using Seventh Sense to schedule your emails in conjunction with TMC, you can still improve your deliverability by sending out smaller and more targeted batches of emails at a time. If you are segmenting your list well, smaller mailings will be a natural side effect.