Preventing STO Timing Conflicts in Eloqua: A Practical Governance Framework

Part 2 of the STO Series

This is Part 2 of a three-part series on mastering Send Time Optimization (STO) in Eloqua.
Part 1 explains how STO arbitration works and why timing conflicts occur when STO and manual scheduling overlap.
This second part introduces a governance framework that prevents those conflicts and ensures contacts receive communications at a healthy cadence.
Part 3 focuses on daily monitoring and reporting in Eloqua Insight to help teams detect frequency spikes and STO collisions in real time.

Overview

STO improves engagement by delivering emails at the time each contact is most likely to respond. However, STO does not coordinate timing with manual sends or Shared Filters. Shared Filters evaluate eligibility before STO queues the send, and STO queues the send after eligibility is granted. This timing gap can cause contacts to receive multiple emails in a short window, even when frequency rules appear correct.