Community ManagerI tend to look at this through the lens of customer relationships rather than technical solutions. If users want your emails, it really doesn't matter whether yours show up at the same time as other brands--if they want to hear from you, they'll be excited whenever they check their email and see your brand name. You can try to send at a less-obvious time of day in the hopes that you're not competing with others (like at :07 or :48 after the hour rather than :00 or :30), but email is ultimately an asynchronous method of communication, and recipients can check it constantly, once a day, or even less! The most important thing is that recipients sincerely want to receive your messages, ideally more than they want to see the other things in their inbox. 🙂
Although we're talking a lot about email today I'd also encourage you to think about a cross-channel strategy :) There is the Intelligent Channel filter to send the message via the “best” channel for that user (The Intelligent Channel computes the engagement rate for each user for each of the three channels by taking the ratio of message interactions (opens or clicks) to the number of messages received over the last six months of activity.)
