Discussions
Send emails based on contact's specific time zone
I would like all of my contacts in a campaign to receive my email at 9:00 am.
Unfortunately that is not possible as the emails are not sent based on the contact's time zone. Therefore I have to pick or create specific state or country segmentations in order to have some kind of breakdown.
Most most my emails are not going out at noon so the west coasts would get them at 9:00 am...which is not ideal for my east coast contats.
It would be great to have!
Comments
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For global companies, this would save a LOT of programming. The US is only one example. Russia and China trump the issue up even further.
Is there any further action on this request? It's clear that the campaign canvas can't handle global campaigns where we need to duplicate long strings to cover even 4 or five time zone groups. In fact, we experience significant problems any time we have a campaign with too many email delivery schedules, even if we set them all to different times in a single time zone. We deliver campaigns to about 30 countries. The ability to set a single delivery schedule relative to a contacts time zone becomes more essential to us each day. Thanks.
Post edited by Unknown User on -
Has this been resolved at all? I don't want to build in filters for different time zones, nor do I want to have an app for it. The "smart send" option (so that people get the email at the specified time at THEIR local time) should be built into the system at the send email step. Eloqua - can you give an update on this?
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People have been asking for this feature since 2013: What if... you could e-mail contacts based on THEIR time zones...?
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People have been asking for this feature since 2013: What if... you could e-mail contacts based on THEIR time zones...?
5 years later and nothing to show for...
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5 years later and nothing to show for...
@Devon Guerrero We need to close this idea as a duplicate and on the other thread announce that we are implementing send time optimization powered by machine learning in the first half of 2019. This feature is more accurate in delivering content at an optimal time than by timezones. For example, you may assume that 9am is the best time to send an email to your customer wherein fact that customer could have a recurring 9am call and doesn't check emails until noon. STO is a more optimal way to handle these use cases.
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@Devon Guerrero We need to close this idea as a duplicate and on the other thread announce that we are implementing send time optimization powered by machine learning in the first half of 2019. This feature is more accurate in delivering content at an optimal time than by timezones. For example, you may assume that 9am is the best time to send an email to your customer wherein fact that customer could have a recurring 9am call and doesn't check emails until noon. STO is a more optimal way to handle these use cases.
I just found the comment with an update. Thanks!!
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Just checking if there's any solution to this yet?
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STO is the best solution and also will improve Email delivereability KPI
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Thanks, and Best Regards
Sachin Jain | CX Community Manager
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Can't upvote this so commenting +1.
STO is nice but it will send over 24hrs. I'm getting complaints that we're sending emails in the middle of the night.
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Hi Cole - I'm not sure US software companies really get this at all, it's not just Oracle.
Let me share what we do to help reduce the problem of emails being delivered at 1:00 am local time for some contacts.
- About seven years ago we made a concerted effort to obtain the Country a person is based. So, all forms ask for email address, names, company and country.
- We then created an excel spreadsheet with two columns. Column A - all countries in the world and Column B - we assigned a Region to each country. e.g. Mexico, USA and Canada = "North America" for us. We split out EU countries and European Countries. Now, these don't specifically follow time zones, but it's much easier to group all contacts with a region = "EU" than it is to add 27 EU nations to a filter. We then uploaded this to Eloqua.
- We created a Program in Eloqua that runs constantly and when it picks up a new Contact with the Country field populated it looks at the value in the Country field and then automatically populates our corresponding Region field on the Contact with e.g. "North America" if the person is from e.g. Canada.
The above is the heavy lifting - that's the "Always On" part of the process. We have multiple uses for this data across a range of campaigns and it's also really helpful for reporting when the region data is pushed into CRM.
But, to your specific question.
We use this data in Shared Filters on the Campaign Canvas. We have Shared Filters set up for each region and in some cases for multiple regions.
This means while a Segment may contain thousands of people, we go from the Segment to a series of Shared filters asking the question - is this person in North America, Central America, South America or the Caribbean? Yes or No. If Yes - I then move them to a WAIT step which is set to e.g. US Central Time and I nominate a time that means anyone in those regions will have the email delivered during their business day, Monday - Friday local time.
From there, it's a waterfall on the canvas. The next Shared Filter asks "are they in a region of EU, Europe, EMEA" and so on.
It's not perfect, but it does give us more control.
