Here you can find the answers to some questions that might arise after working with STO.
If you have a question that is not answered here, please contact us and we'll be happy to add it for future visitors.
Campaign scheduling
A launch is scheduled to 5 years from now, how is this possible?
In some cases and under certain circumstances, especially when there is high load on our system, it may happen that, for a brief period, customers see their launches scheduled to happen 5 years in the future. Please be aware that this is only a temporary setting, the launches will be re-scheduled to their 'normal' date within a short amount of time.
How is that possible that my contacts, who usually open their email at 10:00, still receive their STO emails at 3.00 am? Why does not STO learn their open times?
STO currently considers a timeslot “good” if there is an open afterwards. Thus, it will continue to send emails at the same time while that launch is successful (i.e. it triggers an open). For any given sending time, a negative feedback is when the email is never opened. Only then will the algorithm update itself.
For a long time, STO sent emails to one of my contacts at 6:00 am, but now they get the emails at 4:00 pm. Why is that?
One possible reason is that the client was in the control group in that particular campaign and the control group was scheduled to be sent at 4:00 pm. If this is not the case, the algorithm aims to collect information about every possible send time to have the chance to find even better send times.
The better the current send time performs, the less frequently the algorithm will try different send times, but this will still happen occasionally. This also ensures that we can adapt to changes in the preferences of the contacts.
Monitoring and Reporting
Why can't I see Deliverability Reporting for an STO campaign?
It is currently a limitation for this feature that you cannot see the Deliverability Reporting for the parent campaign (i.e. all 12 launches aggregated). You must open each launch individually to see the deliverability statistics.
My campaign started on Sunday at 18:00 and ended on Monday at 16:00, which week’s results will it contribute to?
When aggregating weekly results, each campaign is attributed to the day on which its control group emails were sent.
I have already launched my first STO campaign but I cannot see any STO results in the Dashboard widget. Why is that?
Results will only be shown 48 hours after the launch of the first STO campaign, to allow for a meaningful amount of engagement results to be returned.
Why can’t I see reporting for my first STO campaign sent to 10 contacts?
If the recipient list contains fewer than 100 contacts there is no control group, therefore the results of this campaign will not appear in the monitoring widget.
Why do you show weekly aggregated reports, and not daily reports?
Differences in open rates between the control and STO group will naturally occur, and we need enough data to ensure that the results are statistically relevant. In order to have a fair comparison, we need to aggregate results on a weekly basis so that these natural differences disappear.
STO and the Automation Center
How can I turn STO on or off for my active programs?
You can only enable or disable STO in a program if its state is In design. You cannot turn STO on or off once the program's state has been changed from In design to another one.
To enable or disable STO in an active program, you have to pause or end it, then copy it to create a new program. Now you can turn STO on or off in the new program.
STO and A/B testing
STO can be used for sending A/B testing batch email campaigns. When combining STO and A/B tests, it has to fulfill these requirements:
- There have to be at least 2 test versions launched before the final version with STO.
- The final (STO) version has to be chosen automatically.
Sending one test version only and then sending the final version as an STO, it could cause either of the following mistakes:
- Only the test version is launched.
- Only the STO campaign is launched.
- Neither of the emails are launched.
