Schedule Email Programs with Recipient Time Zone schedule-email-programs-with-recipient-time-zone
There are two potential scenarios when scheduling an email program while Recipient Time Zone is enabled:
- Scheduling the program to run within the next 25 hours
- Scheduling the program to run more than 25 hours in the future (i.e., next week)
Scenario 1: Within 25 Hours scenario-within-hours
Let’s say you approve an email program with Recipient Time Zone enabled and a scheduled delivery time within the next 25 hours. You may have people in your smart list who live in time zones where the scheduled time has already passed.
In this scenario, we allow you to decide what to do with this subset of qualified people. Click the gear icon next to Recipient Time Zone in the Schedule tile of the email program.
This gives you two options:
-
Deliver the following day in recipient’s time zone: if the email is scheduled to go out on Tuesday at 9:00am, qualified people who live in time zones where the scheduled time has already passed will receive the email on Wednesday at 9:00am.
-
Deliver using the program’s default set time: if the email is scheduled to go out on Tuesday at 9:00am, qualified people who live in time zones where the scheduled time has already passed will receive the email based on your subscription time zone settings. So, if your subscription time zone settings are set to PDT America/Los Angeles, these recipients will still receive the email on Tuesday at 9:00am PDT (whatever time that may be in their own time zones).
Let’s consider this scenario in more detail. Say you’re in San Francisco, scheduling an email at 7:00am for a 9:00am send. In your smart list, there are people from the following regions:
- San Francisco
- Texas
- New York
- Italy
9:00am has already passed in New York and Italy, so qualified people in these two time zones will receive the email based on the Time Zone Settings:
-
Deliver the following day in recipient’s time zone: Wednesday at 9:00am in their respective time zones, OR
-
Deliver using the program’s default set time: Tuesday at 9:00am PDT (New York - 12:00pm EDT and Italy - 6:00pm CET).
Once you approve your program, it starts running within 15 minutes.
Scenario 2: More than 25 Hours scenario-more-than-hours
In this second scenario, you approve an email program with Recipient Time Zone enabled and a scheduled delivery time that’s more than 25 hours in the future. In this case, the program will start running at the scheduled time in the earliest time zone in the world (UTC + 14:00). There may be people who qualify for your smart list in every time zone across the globe, so starting in the earliest time zone allows us to deliver the email at the scheduled date/time to all recipients in their respective time zones.
Head Start
Now, let’s talk about how Head Start works with Recipient Time Zone. Our existing Head Start feature requires the program to be scheduled at least 12 hours in advance. So what does that mean for Recipient Time Zone? Recall that when Recipient Time Zone is enabled, we start running the email program at the scheduled time in the earliest time zone (UTC +14:00). So, to enable both Head Start and Recipient Time Zone, email programs need to be scheduled at least 12 hours ahead of the scheduled time in UTC +14:00.
This means that if you’re in America/Los Angeles and want to enable both Head Start and Recipient Time Zone, you need to schedule the program 34 hours in advance. How did we get to this number?
In short, email programs scheduled with Recipient Time Zone need to start running at the scheduled time in the earliest time zone (i.e., where it reaches midnight first) in order to accommodate every time zone. So, if you schedule an email program…
- with a delivery time within 25 hours, the program starts running within 15 minutes. Recipients who have already passed the scheduled time will receive the email based on the time zone settings you’ve chosen.
- with a delivery time more than 25 hours in the future, the program starts running at the scheduled time in the earliest time zone (UTC +14:00).
- with Head Start, the program starts processing 12 hours prior to the scheduled time in the earliest time zone (UTC +14:00).