Smart Blasts are the new way to reach everyone on your mailing list, optimized with the message most likely to convert. When you launch a Smart Blast, Cortex calculates the likelihood of conversion for the different stages and targets customers with the message most likely to convert. It is the perfect home for your weekly newsletter, giveaways, or promotional emails that are time sensitive but not delivery-critical.

Smart Blast Setup

1. Select Cortex Admin from the menu bar.

2. Select Smart Blast.

3. Select New Email and from the drop down menu select Create New.

4. Fill out the name of your email.

5. You'll be taken to the step 1 of the report builder: Fill out From name, From email, Reply-to email address (optional): Update if you want to send emails from an address different than what was set up during onboarding. Click "Save Draft" if any changes are made and then click "Continue" when you are done.

Pro Tip: Utilize distinct and recognizable names to help differentiate experiments from one another. (20160831 New Product Promo Blast Group A)

5. Continue to step 2 of the builder to the edit email info section and fill out the email's subject lines and preview text.

Email subject lines: Add multiple subject lines for testing.

Preview text (optional): Add the text you wish to display before the subject line when viewed in the inbox. More info here.

5. Step 3 of the builder is where you can add incentives, select a recommendation scheme, or target a segment or specific category.

Incentives (optional): Select the incentives you wish to populate or split test in the email. More info here.

Recommendation Scheme (optional): If you want to select a specific recommendation scheme for your email, choose the scheme from the drop down. More info here.

Segment targeting (optional): Select a segment from the drop down if you want a specific cohort to receive this email.

Item targeting (optional): Select a specific category or item type to include or exclude from the product recommendations in this email.

9. The next step is to select the email type to work with. After you've made your choice you can select "Continue to Editor."

10. From the editor page you will be able to set up your email. Select save every once and while to save all your hard work.

11. Once completed, you can preview your email, send a test email, or create a plain text version of your email by going to the drop down menu in the top right hand corner. In the Drag and Drop builder only, you can export the HTML for your own purposes.

12. "Continue to summary" will take you to the final Summary screen, where you can confirm all your settings and proceed to activate your email:

"Send ASAP" will start sending the email as soon as all the data is processed. This will typically take less than 15-30 minutes, but can take longer for larger sites with a lot of users.

TIP: We recommend creating your emails at least two hours before your desired send time.

13. "Continue to scheduling" will prompt you with a scheduling option:

Set the Start Time and Number of Days. When setting the Start Time, choose the date you wish for it to begin and note that the email will run in 24 hours increments.

Pro Tip: Set your Smart Blast to run for 2 days. Number of Days is most commonly set to 1 day - this means the email will be sent over the course of a 24 hour period. Giving Cortex two or three days to send the message allows it reach more users, who received other messaging on the first day.

The graph below shows the distribution of sends over a 2-day period for a typical smart blast