Motiva's patented Per-Contact Send Time AI is just what it sounds like: It analyzes the engagement behavior of your audience, then uses that data to make predictions about the best time to reach your audience. The more data there is for a contact, the more accurate the predictions. And Motiva collects this engagement data from any contact that has flowed through any email in Eloqua, not just during STAI steps.

Send Time AI uses a staggered-send approach, meaning STAI sends an email to a batch of contacts every hour of the day for a full week to ensure that each contact gets the email at the right time. This is quite different from your standard batch-and-blast email that sends an email to all contacts in a segment at the same time.

To take full advantage of STAI and get the best results, you need to account for a seven day send window in your email marketing schedule. It is possible to restrict the send window to, for example, 5 or 3 days, but the impact will not be as large as a full 7 days.

Of course some emails will be time-sensitive and need to be sent immediately. In this case, don't use STAI. Instead we recommend analyzing the Send Time Report for your audience so you can determine the day and time that has historically resulted in the best engagement.

Everyone engages with their email in a slightly different way. To account for the wide variety of engagement behavior, we've found that it works best to analyze email engagement patterns over the course of one week instead of a single day or hour. A full 7 day window provides enough data to build a more accurate and impactful model compared to other STO approaches that use less data and result in a much lower impact.

Here's a breakdown of how it all works: