Timing is critical in marketing. You’ve probably read dozens of articles about WHEN to send an email. Or post a Facebook update. Or post to Twitter.
To make the most of this information, it’s important you have control over when your emails are sent.
One of the more confusing aspects of ONTRAPORT’s system is how they handle time zones.
Send based on recipient’s time zone
ONTRAPORT does not have an option to send your emails based on your recipients’ time zone. Wish they did, but it just isn’t there.
Some of the lower cost systems will allow you to send by your prospects time. It’s amazing to me that ONTRAPORT hasn’t added this to their service. I hope it’s something they add in the future since most of my clients want to do it that way.
It could be possible using rules and your prospects location to send emails based on where they live. But it’s a lot of work and probably not worth the effort.
So if you can’t send on their time zone, what are ONTRAPORT’s times based on?
Everything is based on YOUR time zone – well almost everything.
Step Sequences and Date Sequences Times
Any times listed in Step Sequences or Date Sequences are based on the time zone you set up in your account when you first started with ONTRAPORT.
You can view/change your time zone in the Personal Profile tab under your name in the upper right corner of your account.
From there you can find the time zone for you account
Now, here’s where the confusion starts….
Broadcast Email Times
Broadcast emails are anything you send to a group of contacts through the contacts tab. Select a group of contact and choose “send an email.” That’s a broadcast.
ONTRAPORT’s broadcast emails are based on the time zone of your computer… What?
Yeah, I don’t get it either. I don’t see why everything isn’t based on the time zone in your account. ONTRAPORT gives some answer for this that I honestly don’t understand. But the bottom line is broadcasts are based on the computer’s time zone.
Now this isn’t an issue if you never leave your time zone or if you are the only one scheduling broadcast emails. But if you have a Virtual Assistant overseas handling your emails then this is a huge issue for you. Your VA needs to do the math to set the correct time.
If they are 10 hours ahead of you and you want to send the email at 8am, then they need to set the email to send at 6pm.
A simpler way to handle this is to not use broadcast emails. Instead, set up a Date Sequence and add the contacts you want to that sequence. This way things can still be set in your time zone.
It’s simpler to set things up in a Date Sequence and keep the entire organization on the same time zone. No conversion necessary.
