International Email Marketing: How to Master Time Zones

 Sending your email at the “wrong” time can derail the most well-crafted campaign. So it’s no surprise that many email marketers put significant effort into optimizing their send times to make sure messages reach subscribers when they’re actively checking their inboxes. Twenty-three percent of all email opens occur within the first hour after delivery, GetResponse found; within the second hour, opens drop by half.

When you’re sending to a global audience, though, things can get tricky. An email sent at noon in New York City reaches inboxes in Sydney, Australia, at 2AM. Your Australian subscribers might check their emails as they wake up in the morning, but the longer your message waits for the open, the more competition it has in the inbox as emails pile up.

Optimizing emails for different time zones is one of the key challenges for email marketers who send to international subscribers. Here are some hands-on tips to help you master this task.

GET TO KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE: WHERE ARE YOUR SUBSCRIBERS BASED?

Finding out where your subscribers are located is the first step toward time zone optimization and making more informed send time and copywriting decisions. Collect geolocation data during the opt-in or use email analytics to better understand the geographic distribution of your subscribers. With the help of geolocation data, you’ll get a better understanding of:

• Where your subscribers are based
• How many subscribers you have in each time zone
• Whether your subscribers concentrate on specific parts of the world or are scattered across a broad range of time zones

INTERNATIONAL AUDIENCE

Based on the results of geolocation analysis, email marketers can choose between two strategies: Choosing a send time based on the most important time zone, or segmenting their list to optimize for different time zones individually.

PRIORITIZING TIME ZONES

If the majority of your audience is based in a single time zone—or in time zones close to each other—it can make sense to focus your optimization efforts on this region. The number of subscribers is one factor that determines time zone prioritization. Also, consider business-related factors such as average customer value for each region and strategic expansion plans for your targets.

Prioritizing time zones and sending your campaign at a time that fits your most valuable region does not require list segmentation and is thus particularly appealing for marketing teams with limited resources. However, you’ll likely miss out on immediate opens and clicks in areas outside of that region, especially when sending time-sensitive promotions.

SEGMENT YOUR LIST BY LOCATION TO OPTIMIZE SEND TIMES IN EACH TIME ZONE

If your subscribers span across a range of time zones, and important markets aren’t close to each other, segmenting your list can be the best approach. This doesn’t mean you have to create a segment for every time zone on your list. Instead, cluster subscribers into manageable segments.

But what if you don’t have the geolocation information for all of your subscribers? This can happen when you only track location with email opens, but not during the sign-up process. Most geolocation analytics rely on a tracking pixel that loads when a subscriber opens your message. If subscribers have not opened any of your emails before—because they’re new on your list or an inactive subscriber, for example—email analytics can’t provide geolocation data for them. Or, if they are reading your email with images disabled, then geolocation data won’t be counted.

Also, Gmail’s image caching makes it impossible to track geolocation. Instead of seeing where a Gmail reader is located, email analytics will show the IP address and location of Google’s proxy servers, potentially placing your subscribers in a wrong time zone.

So what can you do? Create a segment and pick a send time for all subscribers that lack reliable time zone information. You can pick your local time zone or the one of your largest market for this fallback segment.

A segmented approach not only allows you to send emails at the same time in each time zone (for example, always at noon local time), but also gives you the opportunity to test and optimize send times in each location. Reading time preferences differ by audience, and regional habits and schedules can play an important role, too. For example, MailChimp found that most subscribers in Spain read emails between 10am and noon, while optimal send times in Egypt peak at 2pm.

Optimal send times by country, according to MailChimp

Depending on the range of time zones you cover, the number of segments you choose, and the level of testing you commit to, this approach can become very complex and time consuming. However, accounting for local differences and acting on them when sending emails can be a powerful way to increase open and click rates with your international audience.

TIME ZONE MANAGEMENT THROUGH YOUR ESP

Many email service providers (ESPs) have features to help their customers through their time zone struggles.

Time zone management features can be a key criterion when picking an ESP, especially for companies looking to reach subscribers in various time zones but may not have the resources to handle segmentation themselves.

Many ESPs offer features that allow you to send your email at the same local time for each subscriber. For example, when you’re setting your campaign to go out at 9am, the ESP will delay sending to anyone until it’s 9am in their time zone.

If you’d like to experiment with different sending times for each time zone—for example, sending the message at 9am local time to US subscribers, but at 10am local time in Spain—you’ll have to set up manual segments and test them individually.

Time zone management in email marketing goes far beyond testing and optimizing send times. They also impact the content of your email, especially when you’re sending time-sensitive promotions or announcements that contain dates and times.

TIME ZONE EMPATHY

Whether you’re segmenting your email list or focusing your efforts on your most important time zone, always make sure your message is relevant to your audience. A lack of time zone empathy won’t just mean you miss out on clicks and opens, but also can damage your brand reputation.

Being empathic about your subscribers’ time zones is especially important when sending time-sensitive campaigns. The more you emphasize timing in your email—with “Today only” or “Sale ends at midnight” campaigns, for example—the more crucial it is to double-check your campaign for time zone conflicts. Let’s say you’re sending a “Monday only” offer at 10am on a Monday morning in San Francisco. Without segmentation in place, your subscribers in Sydney will receive it on Tuesday, 3am local time, and will likely end up confused and frustrated.

Put yourself in your subscribers’ shoes and ask yourself: What does the timing of this email mean for my subscribers in different time zones? Does the message make sense no matter where people live? Does the email contain time and date information that need special attention?

HANDLING DATES AND TIMES IN EMAIL

Time zone challenges become most obvious when your email contains actual information about dates and times—for example, for events, webinars, or deadlines.

Here are three things to remember when sending emails that contain dates and times:

1. ALWAYS STATE WHAT TIME ZONE YOU’RE REFERRING TO
   

   Never let your subscribers guess what time zone you’re referring to. Make checking for time zone information part of your email proof-reading process, especially when the time changes during daylight savings time. If your automated emails contain times and dates (like weekly webinars, for example), set a reminder to switch templates at the beginning and end of daylight savings.
   

2. LET SUBSCRIBERS VIEW TIMES IN THEIR LOCAL TIME ZONE
   

   Stating the time zone you’re referring to allows subscribers to convert to their local time zone. However, converting time zones can be tedious and confusing, so don’t let your subscribers do all the work. Instead, offer a link to a time zone converter, like Permatime, to make it as easy as possible for your subscribers to translate a date and time to their local time zone.
   

3. MAKE YOUR EMAIL RELEVANT, NO MATTER WHERE YOUR SUBSCRIBERS ARE LOCATED

   Even if you optimize events so that they are at a time when most of your subscribers can attend, it’s not always possible to make it work for everyone. And that’s fine—as long as you find a way to still make your email relevant for every single subscriber, no matter where they’re based.
4. In the email above, for example, we’re promoting a webinar that subscribers in the US and some parts of Europe can attend. However, for our audience based in Tokyo, Japan, the webinar takes place at midnight, making it impossible for them to join. Without additional information, this email would be of no benefit to our subscribers in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Australia, likely causing confusion and frustration.
   However, the email asks subscribers to sign up even if they can’t attend the live webinar, because the webinar recording and slides will be shared with all registrants. Subscribers who cannot attend the webinar—because of their time zones or any other reason—can still get the benefits from it.

   AVAILABILITY AND RESPONSE TIMES: MANAGING EXPECTATIONS

   Email is a great way to receive vital feedback from customers, answer questions, and create a line of communication between brands and consumers. When sending marketing messages to an international audience, you can adjust your send times to fit your subscribers’ time zones; your support hours, however, might not always match your subscribers’ business hours and you might not always be available when your subscribers hit reply. Here’s how you can set the right expectations if your team can’t offer 24h support.
   An email is an asynchronous form of communication and most of your customers will not expect an immediate response. But when time differences come into play, subscribers might have to wait longer than usual before they’ll hear back from you. Keep this in mind, especially when sending emails that likely trigger responses and questions, like major feature announcements or pricing changes. 
   Consider setting up an autoresponder for your reply-to address that reflects your time zone, your support hours, and give an estimate of when subscribers can expect to hear back from you. This helps to set the right expectations.

   HOW DO YOU MANAGE SENDING EMAIL ACROSS TIME ZONES?

   Do you have more tips for sending email internationally? Share them with the email community!
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The Biggest Email Marketing Trends in 2017 Will Be…

 Well, we weren’t really sure. So we asked more than 1,200 email marketers, letting them choose between six promising email marketing trends in 2017:

• Automated emails
• Big Data personalization in emails
• Email encryption
• HTML5 video in email
• Interactive emails
• Omnichannel email experiences

None of those trends got the majority of respondents excited, but a few saw sizable interest.

Without a single mega trend to rally around, we thought we’d explore all six of those trends. In addition to sharing our own thoughts, we’ll add in the opinions of some of our Email Marketing in 2020 ebook contributors, giving you even more reasons to be excited about these email marketing trends in 2017, all of which we think will be impactful.

INTERACTIVE EMAILS

With more than a quarter of marketers saying, “2017 will be the year of interactive emails,” this was our top trend. We like Rebelmail’s definition of email interactivity:

AN ACTION TAKEN IN AN EMAIL THAT TRIGGERS AN EVENT WITHIN THE SAME EMAIL.

Interactive email elements can take many forms, including:

• Hamburger menus and other navigation
• Carousels, image galleries, and sliders
• Hot spots (product tour)
• Offer reveals
• Quizzes
• Reviews
• Search bars
• Add-to-cart functionality

Email interactivity brings some of the interactions that would normally take place on the landing page and pulls them into the email. By allowing more to happen inside an email, it reduces barriers to engagement and makes clickers have even higher intent.

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The two biggest issues that hold back adoption are:

1. Tracking and attribution changes. Since interactivity pulls action from the landing page into the email, click rates become a little less important and in-email engagement becomes more important. And you need to measure that in-email engagement using new metrics like email interactions, which are special opens that are triggered by engaging with interactive email elements. This change in email success measurement can be the trickiest issue when trying to get buy-in from executives to do interactive emails.

But no matter how uncomfortable these changes make email marketers, this change is coming all the same because it improves the subscriber experience.

BIG DATA PERSONALIZATION IN EMAILS

The “right content” portion of the “right content to the right person at the right time” equation for email marketing in many cases equals personalization. Translating the Big Data trend into actionable signals for email marketers starts with breaking down silos and integrating data across channels, which many large brands have been focused on in recent years.

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Once all the data is pooled and the dots are connected—which is no small technological or political feat—brands can build the most detailed views of individual customers that they’ve had to date, using a wide range of reinforcing data points to inform messaging.

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Marketers have largely embraced the inevitability of personalization driving most of the content in emails. However, the process of enabling Big Data personalization is so complex and involved that it’s never likely to be a huge trend in any particular year. Instead, it’s probably truer to say that we’re in the half-decade of Big Data personalization.

HTML5 VIDEO IN EMAIL

In January 2013, I made what seemed like a not very radical prediction at the time: “Video in email will finally take off.” Then Apple dropped support for HTML5 video in all of its email clients, slamming the brakes on this promising trend.

Now, with the launch of iOS 10, HTML5 video support is back! As of November, more than 53% of emails were opened in Apple email apps, which is more than enough to justify trying it. Just be sure to build in a fallback for subscribers using email clients that don’t support HTML5 video.

While the marketers we polled were more excited about interactive emails, it’s hard for us here at Litmus to not see HTML5 video as a form of interactivity. Moreover, video in email is straightforward and easy for subscribers to understand—and for that reason is likely to be a catalyst in making both marketers and email users more receptive to other forms of interactivity.

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AUTOMATED EMAILS

Even if this isn’t the year of automated emails, marketers clearly know the importance of this trend. Triggered emails, like welcome emails and cart abandonment emails, already generate the majority of email marketing revenue at some brands, even though triggered email volume typically comprises about 5% of overall email volume.

The outsized productivity of such a small percentage of email volume presents huge opportunities for brands to better engage subscribers. It also calls into question all the time and resources that are currently spent on broadcast emails, the volume of which continues to climb every year.

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OMNICHANNEL EMAIL EXPERIENCES

Consumers expect brands to recognize them across channels and to treat them consistently. Brands are racing to catch up to consumer expectations.

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Piecing all of a consumer’s interactions together to create a single view of the customer is the holy grail…and is difficult. Equally difficult is then acting on that single view. Being able to nimbly send the right messages to each consumer via the individually appropriate channel will require major integration. It will also require a lot of machine intelligence.

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EMAIL ENCRYPTION

2016 was a great year for email marketing, but it was a horrible year for email. Hillary Clinton’s emails and her use of a private email server were a major campaign issue. Yahoo revealed that 1 billion user accounts were hacked in 2013 and another 500 million in 2014. And then the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee’s emails.

While encryption wouldn’t have prevented the hacks at Yahoo or the DNC, email security is top of mind for many right now. With emails becoming more personalized and powered by data from many channels and Internet of Things devices, the call for greater security to ensure privacy will only grow.

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Gmail already highlights which emails are encrypted, using a little lock icon to flag which were sent using transport layer security (TLS). If another major inbox provider follows Gmail’s lead, then encryption will gain serious momentum toward becoming a best practice.

While it’s unclear which trend or trends will dominate the year, it’s guaranteed that 2017 will be the year of email marketing change. It always is.

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“Open This Email Right Now!” What Makes a Good Subject Line?

 You’re drowning in emails, right? Every day the inbox piles up with ever more sales, ads, offers, news, and even the occasional personal note. Some email providers like Gmail segregate your incoming mail in an effort to keep the important items front and center. Even so, your inbox and mail filters still stack up with messages. If you can’t get to every email you receive, how do you make sure your own email campaigns cut through the clutter in your readers’ inboxes?

Your subject line is the first and maybe most crucial tool in your email marketing kit. Often an afterthought, the subject line is actually quite powerful. Take advantage of that power by using “S.P.A.M.” Not the bad spam that gets you banned from mailboxes. An all-caps S.P.A.M. that reminds you that the best subject lines are Short, Personable, Attention-getting, and Meaningful to the reader. Here’s why these intertwining characteristics are important:

Short

Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it’s the flesh and blood of email subject lines. Studies show that the best-performing subject lines — the ones attracting the most opens and the most clicks — are a maximum of 49 characters. That’s roughly one-third of your average 140-character Tweet. Subject lines with 49 or fewer characters attract 12 percent more opens than their lengthier counterparts, and their click-through rates are a whopping 75 percent higher. Start cutting characters stat!

To help keep your subject lines short and sweet, plug them into this free character counter. Remember, 49 is the magic number. Once you hit 50, open and click rates begin to drop. Yes, that includes spaces. Yes, people’s attention spans really are that short.

Personable

No one wants to hear from a bot. Subject lines that sound like they rolled off the assembly line can be sniffed out (and ignored) immediately. Even within the confines of 49 characters, it’s possible to be personable. If you’re a small business owner, chances are you know many of your clients pretty well. Imagine what they’d want to hear from you in an email, and use that knowledge to craft your subject lines so they sound like they could only come from you or your business.

Emotion

Emotion is a strong, personable way to appeal to readers. People often make decisions based on emotion instead of reason, so write subject lines that invoke feelings. Surprise them, make them smile, offer solutions to their pain points, even create fear of missing out — elicit an emotion and elicit an open.

Emojis

Emoticons, also known as emojis, are another personality-driven way to entice readers to open your emails. Not only do they make your emails stand out in inboxes, but they easily convey emotion, and studies show that they can increase open rates by 56 percent. That said, use emojis with caution. Some older email programs can’t read them, and not all emojis look the same across all devices and operating systems. If using emojis in your subject lines, be sure to test them well on different computers, tablets, and phones before deploying them in actual campaigns.

Attention-getting

At heart, grabbing your readers’ attention is the most important role of a subject line. Here are a few ways to do that:

Humor

Humor is a wonderful way to attract attention to your emails. If you can craft pun-tastic or funny subject lines in fewer than 49 characters, go for it, as long as they’re relevant and suitable to your audience.

Urgency

Comedy can be difficult, however, and often isn’t possible to pull off with every email. You know what else draws attention? Urgency. Flash sales, limited-time promotions, low quantities of popular inventory — all of these say, “Going fast, so open this email fast.” (That’s only 35 characters, by the way.) Urgency equals eyeballs.

Current events

Or consider adding some cultural relevance or timeliness to your subject lines. If you can skillfully play off a popular film or television title that’s in the public consciousness, or springboard off an event happening in the news, that can snag some opens. Of course, use caution when spinning current events into subject line gold — what you see as a promotional opportunity may not be greeted the same way by all your readers.

First names

Putting your readers’ first names in the subject line can also make them take notice. After all, people innately perk up at their own name, and a recent Experian studyindicated that names in subject lines can increase open rates by nearly thirty percent.

Pose a question

Another way to grab attention is to pique readers’ curiosity with a question. A question demands an answer, and it can prompt your recipients to open the email either to learn that answer or to confirm their own responses.

Meaningful to the reader

What value does your email bring to the reader? (That question is 47 characters, in case anyone’s counting.) All the humor, personality, and attention-getting tactics in the world can’t save an email campaign that doesn’t mean something to your readers. Whether you’re communicating about a special they won’t want to miss out on, a pesky problem that your business has solved for them, or a benefit they never knew they needed, your subject line is the first place to convey that this email will be useful to them.

Exclusivity

One way to make an email meaningful is to imply exclusivity. Subject lines about private sales, VIP invitations, and special promotions for only your best customers can make your readers feel like privileged recipients, and more likely to open your email.

Specificity

The more specific your emails are, the more likely your readers are to click on them. “Big Sale!” is too vague and open-ended to mean much. Instead, try something like, “Save 40% on our most popular model today only!” It gets right to the point, creates urgency, entices the reader, and invites curiosity: Which model is the most popular one, why is it so popular, how awesome is it that it’s 40% off, and what time am I going to get one?

Believability

That all said, don’t promise something with your subject line that you don’t deliver on in the body of the message. All it takes is one misleading or misdirecting subject line to lose a reader forever.

S.P.A.M., not spammy

Start examining the subject lines that stack up in your inbox. Which ones catch your eye, and which ones make you reach for the delete button? Which create a desire to open the email, and which are vague or nondescript?

LinkedIn is a master at effective subject lines. If you use LinkedIn, you’ve probably received an email that says something along the lines of, “Joe Schmo and 4 others viewed your profile.” This subject line hits all four intertwining aspects of S.P.A.M.:

• It’s short, coming in under the 49-character threshold.
• It’s personable; regardless of whether you know Joe Schmo, the use of his name adds personality and makes the email seem less automated.
• It’s attention-getting and invites curiosity — who were the other four people?
• And it has meaning: this email promises to aid your professional networking efforts.

Of course, you never can reach every single person with every single email you send. But to keep your audience opening and clicking on your campaigns, remember S.P.A.M. Make those subject lines short, personable, attention-getting, and meaningful to the reader.

Read more on crafting excellent subject lines here and here.

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