Understanding Recipient Time Zone

Email and engagement programs can be configured to be delivered according to recipients’ time zones, eliminating the need to create multiple programs—send once and Marketo automatically holds the email until the correct local time.

Email Programs

There are two primary scenarios when scheduling an email program:

1. Scheduling the program to run within the next 25 hours.
2. Scheduling the program to run more than 25 hours in the future (i.e., next week).

In order to accommodate every time zone, email programs scheduled with Recipient Time Zone start running at midnight in the first/earliest time zone in the world (UTC +14:00).

Engagement Programs

When you schedule an engagement program stream and Recipient Time Zone is active, the program cast will start running at midnight in UTC +14:00. We require you to schedule the first cast at least 25 hours in the future (24 hours + some time to get the campaign started) because people may qualify for the cast in every time zone across the globe. Starting processing at this time in UTC +14:00 guarantees that we’ll send the email at the scheduled date and time for every person who qualifies for this cast.

Calculating Time Zone

Marketo calculates time zone based on a person’s City, State, Country, or Zip Code. If we’re unable to calculate someone’s time zone from these values, we revert to our Inferred City, Inferred State, Inferred Country and Inferred Zip Code fields.

In cases where we have only Country or only State available:

• For countries with three or fewer time zones, we select the middle time zone.
• For states with two time zones, we select the earlier of the two.

If we’re still unable to determine someone’s time zone from any combination of these fields, we will not assign a time zone and the email will be sent based on your Marketo subscription time zone. So, if your program is scheduled for 9:00am PDT, people with no assigned time zone will be sent the email at 9:00am PDT.