To send each one of my marketing emails to all of my contacts at 10AM in their respective time zones (to increase open rates). I’d like to do this using one email instead of duplicating it and sending out to different lists manually. So I am using the Smart Send feature.
Challenge:
Regarding HubSpot’s Smart Send, the time zones it uses is not intuitive for the user. It’s based off of the IP Timezone/address from HubSpot Insights and cannot be manually edited/changed.
This results in **many of the users being “unknown” (**half of all contacts in my case, likely because I import contacts from our sales team so there’s no conversion tracked on HubSpot) - many others that do show a time zone show it from places we do not do business in.
I have entered different time zones in the default “Time Zone” field for both contacts and companies (i.e. “UTC-04:00”, “Canada/Toronto”, or just copying and pasting it from the options listed in Smart Send: “Eastern Time (UTC-04:00)”) - but Smart Send does NOT pick these up.
Possible solutions?
I think it would be very helpful to customers to be able to manually set time zones for Smart Send.
This can be as simple as allowing users to manually enter a time zone (i.e. UTC-05:00) into the time zone field for either Contacts and/or Companies that would be picked up by Smart Send ← this is key since I currently can enter time zones, but they do not affect Smart Send.
Hoping this will be in development soon as I think many marketing professionals who do email marketing would find it very useful
To add to this, can the same functionality be adapted to allow a smart ‘event date/time’ to be added to the content of an email. This would allow us to create a scheduled event in our timezone time, add it as a ‘personalisation token’ and for it to show the contacts corresponing time in their timezone.
For this to work, the field would of course have to be updatable to ensure everyone has a timezone assigned.
Currently we have to manually update a field with the event time or create separate emails per timezone.
Piggybacking off this - I imported my entire client contacts database form a different CRM, so of course we don’t have all of their IP addresses stored already in HubSpot. What we do have, though, are cities/states/countries saved for every contact. It would be great if we could select to have an email sent at a specific time depending on each contact’s IP address or saved location (city/state/etc.) data depending on which applies for each contact. With thousands of contacts, it can be a large undertaking to update every person’s or even every company’s timezone, so to have that choice would be incredibly helpful.
Similar idea but for a nationwide sales team using HubSpot, HubSpot doesn’t automatically convert the time zones bason the user’s location, instead it relies on a centrally controlled time zone set on an admin level. Users then have to keep in mind that task reminders will not go off at the desired times and have to add/subtract the amount of hours to match their own time zone.
This is also something I’d like to see implemented. Same as everyone above, I have contacts for which I know the city and state, but were uploaded by the sales team as possible contacts. There are quite a few of them and of course, since we know city and state, we technically “know” the timezone, but these contacts have no IP recorded so Smart Send doesn’t recognize them at all.
I realize that using the IP is the most automated way to do this with Smart Send, but I think it would also be helpful if Smart Send did a check of a TIMEZONE property manually set by us first and then a calculated from the city and state next before defaulting to IP.
This could be as simple as having a pulldown (with standardized values that match the ones HubSpot sets using IP now) for TIMEZONE that we can manually select. If that value is set, it overrides the timezone set by IP. This works better for several reasons. For instance, what if a contact is on a business trip and filled out our form from a west coast IP, but actually works in the East?
The second check can be by city and state. We realize this is a bit more complicated and might take more time to implement, but could be very helpful in making the system “smarter.”
The third check would be by IP.
As a final check, if all previous options are blank, then TIMEZONE is simply set to the sender’s (our) TIMEZONE by default.
Thoughts? I think it might be simple enough to set a parameter for TIMEZONE we manually set first. I realize the city and state check would require a connection to a database to ensure accuracy so that might take more time. I assume this would either require the construction of an internal database or connection to a third party.
As a side thought, it’s more important than ever to improve Smart Send now that you have the business card scanner in the mobile app. That might make checking by city and state a priority over a manually set TIMEZONE in fact, meaning you’d reverse the order of those checks in the scenario I described above.
This feature needs to be implemented ASAP! It’s a very useful feature, but very limited because of not being able to update any sort of time zone property.
It has almost been a year since this was originally posted and it only has 32 upvotes. I thought this would be afffecting more people.
I did not know you could not manually edit this. It really would help a lot if adminstrator’s could manually edit this when they import contact lists from trade shows and conferences. Has HubSpot looked into this and provided a solution?
We would use this feature if we can add timezones manually.
Our timezone is not an ideal time for sends to some of our major markets. Having it default to our timezone for a large number of contacts is not great.
I went to add timezones to all the contacts that don’t have one - only to discover it only works for the IP address.
Is the only way to make this work to create multiple sends for each different time zone and manually schedule those sends?
I’m submitting this as a request to make the IP Time Zone field editable.
I use the Time Zone based email send and I have some in East Coast time that get the email as if they were in Australia. To be more relevant and send at a ‘best practice’ time frame, it would be great to adjust the contacts IP time zone.
In browsing the forum, it looks like many others have a similar need to manually edit the IP Time Zone field. Perhaps an option to default to auto-assignment, but an override when you know the contact is in an incorrect time zone.
I agree - the ability to manually update an IP time zone would be extremely valuable (especially when contacts may be receiving time-sensitive marketing emails in the wrong timezone).
Agreed; I would use this too.
Currently about 30% of our contacts have the IP time zone field populated. Examples of ones that do not have IP time zone populated include councils - I am pretty sure councils aren’t picking up and moving to a new time zone!
I would like to see editable time zone functionality. At the moment I am seriously considering whether we need to jury-rig our default timezone to the timezone where the majority of our customers are, so that our email nurtures don’t go to them in the middle of the night.
(Explained for people that don’t get this comment - when IP time zone isn’t set, contacts get automated emails issued in the default time zone of your HubSpot instance - that is, where we are, at our company’s HQ. BUT this is on the other side of the world Vs where our core client bases are. Where IP time zone isn’t set on a contact, they are consistently getting our onboarding nurture emails in the middle of the night.)
Even if it were possible to add “ip city” and “ip country” to an import file, then HubSpot could call the API to convert those to “ip timezone” during import, or easier if timezone send could work off those as well.
My soution was in a Google Sheet to:
Use Google’s Geocode API to get lat/long from the city and country, then to
Use the lat/log to get the timezone id (format is e.g. Europe/London so very similar to ip time zone as europe_slash_london), then to
Ability to overwrite the contact property IP Timezone!
Yes we so need this. About a third of our contacts - you know the thousands and thousands that pay *EXPLICIT* euros a month for - do not have an IP Timezone.
This is because we have to manually import our customers from another system. So our leads get emails on time - via the brilliant delay to contact’s time zone in workflows - while our global installed customer base gets their emails at the wrong time!
Please make IP Timezone editable - at least via import, ideally via workflow so we can automate this.
…TBH I just learnt that it is IP timezone running the workflow delay to timezone feature and I am gutted that it is not working for so many thousands of our emails
Its pretty wild that this is not a function. It virtually makes workflows useless when sending in contacts timezone. If manually imported, it defaults to account timezone. And this cannot be changed even if I collect their timezone
