HubSpot Ideas

JulieHuang

Manually Changing/Adding Time Zones for HubSpot Smart Send

My Goal: 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 Hombre feliz

Actualizaciones de HubSpot
Estado actualizado a: Not Currently Planned
May 27, 2020 12:21 PM

Thanks for your comments on the idea. This isn't planned for development in the next quarter. For transparency and clarity, I'm updating this issue to 'Not currently planned' for the time being. We will re-evaluate in the future and we will update this idea if anything changes. Please feel free to upvote and continue to leave feedback on this thread.

36 Comentarios
jm
Colaborador

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.

ncortazzo
Participante

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.

deliah
Miembro

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. 

CWBourque
Colaborador | Partner

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. 

 

Thoughts?

CWBourque
Colaborador | Partner

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. 

parryp
Miembro

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.

noamkahn
HubSpot Employee

this is very important! 

AmandaBell
Participante

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?

Gareth-SB
Participante

Hi,

 

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?

MichaelHatch
Miembro

I need this functionality added ASAP. this is silly you can't do this.

h5t
Miembro

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. 

 

carlynshaw
Miembro

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). 

MarshaJones
Participante

We import a lot of leads who expect to hear from us through our webinar platform or through third party syndication.  Allo of these opted in contacts don't have associated time zone.  At the very least we would like to set a time zone sending parameter rather than have to wait for their cookie session to set the Ip address.  Either make this editable or give us another way to set time zone sending, please.  

Estado actualizado a: Not Currently Planned
jaleonard19
Equipo de producto de HubSpot

Thanks for your comments on the idea. This isn't planned for development in the next quarter. For transparency and clarity, I'm updating this issue to 'Not currently planned' for the time being. We will re-evaluate in the future and we will update this idea if anything changes. Please feel free to upvote and continue to leave feedback on this thread.

DimensionFund
Miembro

We just signed up with HubSpot and this is an issue for us. It does seem that we should be able to set the timezone ourselves. Given that HubSpot can't send out an email over time except for drip campaigns, at least sending out by timezone was helpful in ensuring that a large email send didn't go out all at once. Now we can't even set a timezone. 

 

This does seem to be a basic functionality that HubSpot should have. 

elizsmith
Colaborador

It would be great to have the ability to include a personalization token in the content of the email.  The current situation has led to us hosting several virtual events, and while our contacts are around the globe, it would help greatly to be able to personalize the emails so that the time of the event will show respective of their time zone. 

ETA4Becca
Miembro

I am running in to the same issue and was asked by a fellow team member to see about how to figure out a way to connect our contact's city with that timezone so that we could send out emails etc. at the same time to everyone. (ie: everyone receives the email at 10am their timezone). THen i needed to figure out a way backfill this for the contacts we already have. From what i am reading on here - this is NOT  possibility right now??

 

Thanks,

DimensionFund
Miembro

No. It's not possible. However, as you send out emails, Hubspot will in many cases figure out where a contact is located based on their IP address. We're at around 20% of contacts after a few months so eventually it will be a larger share of our contacts. 

 

It is disappointing that we can't send based on the state they are in or some other field that would get us nearer to contacts receiving emails at the time we want them to receive them. 

 

At this time, I don't believe that they are working on a way to give us this flexibility. 

AmeliaE
Participante

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.) 

jamesoaus
Participante

This would be incredibly helpful!