Using Campaign Automation to Send Emails Based on a Recipient’s Time Zone

In today’s global society, more and more businesses have customers in multiple time zones. This means that timing emails according to an audience’s time zone becomes an important consideration for many organizations. You may want to ensure, for example, that recipients receive an email right before lunchtime, regardless of what time zone they are in.

If you want to send emails to your various audiences at a certain time in their time zone, you could use separate marketing lists. However, ClickDimensions customers have another option. We can use campaign automation to do the hard work! First, we need to add an option set to our contact record. In this example, I will be using US time zones:

Next, we will set up the campaign automation with an entry point (I have used an Added to List trigger) and four wait timers, one for each US time zone:

When a trigger branches into more than one path, a decision node will pop up on the canvas. The decision node allows us to apply some logic that will determine which path or paths the participant will take:

Here, we are checking to see what value is on the participant’s contact record. The campaign automation will send the participant to its corresponding wait timer.

Now here’s where the magic happens:

Each wait timer is configured for a specific amount of time and a time zone. I have this set to wait one minute – this means that as soon as the participant is added to the campaign automation, we are checking the time zone and then waiting one minute before checking the current time. If it is between Monday and Friday and it is between 9 am and 3 pm in Central Time, the participant will move forward to the next step:

To visualize this further, here’s a look at my timeline. My contact is set to EST, so my contact followed the EST path:

And there you have it – a simple campaign automation to ensure emails are sent in the correct time zone.

Happy Marketing!