Put Your Newsletter In The (Time) Zone
Email Marketing - Justin Premick - March 27th, 2007 - Permalink
One of the challenges that we all face as email publishers is getting subscribers to open our messages and take action.
Many factors influence whether they do this or not.
One that I frequently see people discussing and testing is the time of day that messages are sent.
How can we do this, considering that subscribers come from all over the world, and their schedules are scattered across the day?
The Best Part of Waking Up…
Lately, many people have reported that sending a message early in the morning gets the best result. (an aside: as always, test this on your own. Your subscribers may prefer a different time.)
Of course, there’s a problem with this: 8:00AM in New York is 1:00PM in London. And 3:00PM in Johannesburg. Got subscribers in Sydney? Forget the morning because it’s 11:00PM - those guys are already turning in for the night!
Sure, you could just assume that with so many people sending email from the USA, they’re just used to it by now.
Or, you could take advantage of AWeber’s geographic targeting to send them the message in their local time.
I Can DO That?
Sure! Consider:
- You can use views to segment your list and send unique broadcasts to different groups of subscribers.
- Since AWeber automatically captures subscribers’ geographic information when they opt in through a form or by emailing your autoresponder, you can create views based on location.
- You can schedule broadcasts in advance for different times of day.
So, you can send out broadcasts to your subscribers, and use views to deliver the message to people at the same local time.
Break Your List Down By Time Zone
To do this, you’ll use the coordinates for the lines of longitude (meridians) for the appropriate regions/time zones.
Specify an area/time zone by doing a two-part search:
- Longitude (from IP) is greater than or equal to __________
- Longitude (from IP) is less than or equal to __________
For example, to get subscribers who are on Eastern Time, do the following search…
This will return subscribers who are connecting to the Internet from locations that follow Eastern time.
Save the view…
Choose that view while setting up your broadcast…
…and set the appropriate time for the message to be sent:
This will deliver your broadcast to your Pacific Time subscribers at 8:00AM local time (since Pacific time is 3 hours behind Eastern time).
Using Meridians To Estimate Time Zones
Meridians are generally 15 degrees apart.
| Time zones don’t run perfectly north-south with the meridians, so you may have some subscribers who see your message up to an hour earlier or later according to their local time than people who are not located far away as the bird flies. Please bear in mind that the regions listed are approximate. |
You can get a 
complete set of timezones/meridians at the CIA Factbook.
| Region | Difference from UTC | Difference from ET | Min. Longitude | Max. Longitude |
| USA (Indiana to the East Coast) | -5 hours | 0 | -82.5 | -67.5 |
| USA (Illinois to Kansas) and Central America | -6 | -1 | -97.5 | -82.5 |
| USA (Colorado to Utah) | -7 | -2 | -112.5 | -97.5 |
| USA (Nevada to the West Coast) | -8 | -3 | -127.5 | -112.5 |
| United Kingdom | 0 | +5 | -7.5 | 7.5 |
| Western Europe (Spain to Poland) | +1 | +6 | -7.5 | 22.5 |
| Eastern Europe, South Africa | +2 | +7 | 22.5 | 37.5 |
| Eastern Australia (Sydney, Melbourne) | +10 | +15 | 142.5 | 157.5 |
| Western Australia (Perth) | +8 | +13 | 112.5 | 127.5 |
| India | +5.5 | +10.5 | 67.5 | 90.0 |
Copy/paste the appropriate longitudes from the above table when creating your views, then set up and queue broadcasts for the appropriate times.
A Couple Things To Remember
- Don’t bother creating views for every time zone. That’s 24 broadcasts where you’d normally have one. Are you really going to get anything positive out of spending the time to set up a unique broadcast for your subscribers in the Aleutians? Focus in on your biggest, most important segments.
- You’ll need to remember to send a broadcast to the rest of your list too (the ones you aren’t targeting by time zone). Use a view, or the Suppression File feature, to make sure you don’t send duplicate copies to any subscribers.
Use this tactic to reach more subscribers at the times when they are most responsive, increasing your opens, clickthroughs and sales!
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 8:31 am and is filed under Email Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment response, trackback from your own site, or permalink.
March 27th, 2007 at 10:01 am
Brilliant article thankyou. It is information like this (Oh I think we knew this but most of us haven’t actually done anything about it) that helps us marketers and therefore creates a better relationship between aweber and us.
I wonder if everyone will learn the real lesson here?
Namely that you (Aweber) are showing us the kind of things that we (hard working marketers) should be doing for our own customers!
I for one really value these articles.
March 27th, 2007 at 10:03 am
Oh and a quick question..I assume that any given ‘view’ re-queries the data in the list it pertains to when it is used on subsequent occasions?
March 27th, 2007 at 10:36 am
Great info and I’m sure it will be very helpful.
Just one aside though - I’ve found that some of my subscribers are actually in a different geographical location to the one reported, usually because the ISP they use is not in the same country.
But I’m sure it’ll work for the majority. Thanks again Justin, I especially like having the PDF for reference because it saves me having to work out the time I want to broadcast to UK subscribers ;¬)
March 27th, 2007 at 10:42 am
Mike,
Yes, the view is always live at the date it’s used. Meaning it’s self updating with any new subscribers that match the same criteria.
March 27th, 2007 at 11:02 am
Hey Justin,
Thanks for the update - this is killer info.
Nice meeting you and Tom in DC!
Keep the upgrades coming and I’ll continue spreading
the word about Aweber!
Here’s that blog posts I mentioned during dinner:
http://www.musthavemarketing.com/blog/date/2006/09/
Later
March 27th, 2007 at 11:13 am
Thanks Tom,
Thought so…which leads to…
Is there a way of saving ‘only’ the subscribers that were sent a particular broadcast?
Let’s say I want to put out a quarterly offer and only keep broadcasting/conversing to the first group queried..(hope that makes sense). Then I start again a quarter later to a new sub group?
March 27th, 2007 at 11:21 am
Mike,
Use specific dates in the search area to create a view of subscribers who were added during that period. Since it’s impossible for new subscribers to be added during February 2007 at this point, a view that contained the following would never change.
Date Added >= 02/01/07
Date Added < 03/01/07
March 27th, 2007 at 11:46 am
Ahhhhhh….
Of course…
Many thanks
March 27th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Hi Tom,
If time segmenting a broadcast is worth doing, wouldn’t be worth setting a goal of automating the whole process?
That way we would have the option to broadcast a message at, say 8am local time, everywhere. That way my subscribers is California, Maine, Scotland, Dubai, Kasikstan, and Singapore would all get their mail first thing in the morning.
Worth thinking about?
Neill Neill
March 27th, 2007 at 6:16 pm
Hi Neill, Tom,
I second that one (automating the whole process), Neill, if it’s possible.
Living and working in Australia (while most of the rest of the world is asleep) I am all too aware of the size of my inbox when I start work in the morning. Even with spam filters in place, sorting through ‘missed spam’ and dealing with emails quickly means email I receive overnight often gets less focus than email I receive during my day.
I’m less likely to follow newsletter links in the morning when there are plenty of business emails in the box needing priority before I ’start’ my working day. During the day, I’m more likley to follow newsletter links for a break.
Jane Teresa
March 27th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Another great feature in Aweber that I didn’t actually know about!
These articles are very valuable and remind me why I am so glad that we picked Aweber over and above any other auto-responder system.
Good work guys.
March 27th, 2007 at 8:35 pm
I didn’t know the views were updated real time. I have been created new views for a certain group every time I send out a new broadcast.
By the way, is there any way to delete the old views? The system doesn’t allow me to do so as it says I have sent a broadcast to that view previously. As a result, my views are ever increasing.
March 28th, 2007 at 3:02 am
Yes I agree with Neill Neill.
Would be a great addition to Aweber’s arsenal.
March 28th, 2007 at 5:09 am
It would be nice to see a blog posting on how you capture the geographic location. I understand it is done through IP addresses captured, but I am unsure how accurate this is.
March 28th, 2007 at 6:09 am
[…] AWeber explains their process in the posting, “Put Your Newsletter in The (Time) Zone.” […]
March 28th, 2007 at 9:43 am
Hi Tom,
They’ve got you now haven’t they. What a brilliant idea (and a great and marketable selling point for aweber too) The option to send a message at 7am or 8am or 9am local time for all members of a particular view/list.
I bet one of your backroom boffins is working on it already yeah?
Mie
March 29th, 2007 at 10:46 am
Interesting. But, as someone else pointed out, this is really functionality that broadcast message setup should provide. E.g. Beside the Send On Time a simple checkbox for delivery in the receivers timezone would be much more useable.
The problem I see with Justins original idea is that I’d have to setup multiple copies of the broadcast message, each with the timezone related views. And the problem with that is there is no simple quick way to duplicate a message other than copy and paste. This is tedious and error prone. Especially if you have plain text/html messages. Why doesn’t the create message function give us the option of copying a previous message?
April 1st, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Let me join the others who have already pointed out that it would be terrific if you could automate this — for follow ups as well as for broadcasts.
April 5th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
Actually, what I want is something much simpler: to have the e-mails posted from *my* time zone. That is to say, the date stamp on AWeber mail is Eastern (Standard|Daylight) Time. I live in Mountain Time. I’d rather the mail "I" send to my customers would show *my* time zone, rather than the time of one of my providers in another state.
June 6th, 2007 at 9:44 am
this is a great way of synching with a client’s circadian rythms
June 29th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
This is great for broadcast messages.
Is there any way of controlling or influencing what time an auto- responder message goes out (rather than a broadcast)? What determines when an auto responder message is sent?
I have some subscribers who are getting messages after work on a Friday which is not much use (I know because I get the out of office response).
Is it determined by the original sign-up time?
If I add to my list of messages (after a break) is it then determined by when I added the messages to the list?
June 29th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
Phil,
Autoresponder and follow up messages aren’t scheduled for a particular time of day. They’re sent during a 24-hour "window."
Example: I sign up & receive your autoresponder at 2:15pm on Monday. Your next message is set to go 2 days after that autoresponder. I’ll be sent your message sometime between 2:15PM on Wednesday and 2:15PM on Thursday.
While we try to send each follow up message as close to the beginning of that window as possible, the exact time a follow up is sent depends partly on overall mail volume.
Hope that helps!
October 23rd, 2007 at 9:38 am
[…] I’ve listed a few today to provoke some constructive thought on the subject. But we’ve covered some of these in the past, such as Justin’s post on targeting your subscribers’ time zones, and we’ll continue to with posts on topics like list segmentation and effective copywriting. […]
November 2nd, 2007 at 11:30 am
[…] Go here for an article with a chart of the different Longitudes. (Please bear in mind that the regions listed are approximate.) […]
December 2nd, 2007 at 3:55 pm
If it is possible to target Timezones. Is it possible to send out a communication to a specific geographic location? Send an email to all of the people in Sydney, Australia?
December 3rd, 2007 at 9:32 am
Shane,
Since the instructions in this post target geographical coordinates, you could always narrow those down to a smaller area than an entire time zone to target a little closer to the desired geographic location.
You could search for subscribers using the "City" value we obtain for subscribers by IP address, but I would caution you that this would target only people who access the internet from Sydney, and not anyone in any near-distant areas.