The Complete Guide on Timezones for SMS Marketing in Shopify

Yotpo SMS & Email lets you set your timezone to ensure accurate SMS campaign scheduling.

In this article, you'll learn how to set your timezone in the SMS & Email settings.

Setting up your timezone

1. In your Yotpo SMS & Email main menu, go to Settings > General Settings.
2. Under General settings, scroll down to your Global sender settings.
3. Select your store’s timezone from the drop-down list. In case а customer hasn’t entered their phone number with their country code (i.e. +1), it will be automatically added according to the country you select in the Specify country field.

Scheduling campaigns based on a customer’s timezone

The solution for merchants who send messages to different time zones is the setting for scheduling campaigns based on the recipient’s time zone. It’s a checkbox you can see when creating your text marketing campaign or automation.

1. In your Yotpo SMS & Email main menu, go to Campaigns > My Campaigns.
2. Select an existing SMS campaign or create a new one.
3. From the SMS campaign editor, enable the toggle next to Schedule for later.
4. Select the date and time you'd like to send the campaign, and then select the checkbox to send according to the subscriber's timezone. 

Setting Quiet Hours

Another way to make sure your customers won’t receive text messages from you in the wee hours, is to set Quiet hours.

Setting Quiet hours will ensure that during the specified time span your customers will not receive any text messages. The text message delivery will be postponed to a later time and will be sent as soon as the quiet hours period has ended.

1. In your Yotpo SMS & Email main menu, go to Settings > General Settings.  
2. Scroll down to SMS Quiet hours, and select disable or enable. If you choose to enable this feature, then:
   • In the From field select the starting time of your quiet hours period (e.g. 9 pm)
   • In the To field select the time the quiet hours period will end (e.g. 9 am)

Excluding or including specific countries

You have the option to either include or exclude specific countries from receiving your text message.

In the Country limitations section go to Limitations and pick one of the options from the Send SMS only to the following countries drop-down menu (exclude or include).

Тype in the name of the country/countries you wish to exclude/include from the list of your recipients.

To better predict and manage the cost of your campaign, you can also set a Max message price. In the drop-down menu, select either Disable or Enable. If you choose to enable this feature, type in the desired maximum cost of a single text message.

Example: If you have excluded a country and have set the maximum cost per message to be $0.10, then Yotpo SMS & Email will not send messages to anybody in this country and also to anywhere else where a single text message costs more than $0.10.

Don’t overwhelm your customers

To avoid sending your customers more than 1 text message in a short period of time, set a Smart Sending Period in the General Settings section.

In your SMS & Email Settings menu go to the Smart Sending Period field and set the time frame within which you’d like your customers not to receive messages from you.

Example: If you set your Smart Sending period to 16 hours and try to send a customer a message 12 hours post sending them one, we will identify that and will not send the message.

If your messages aren’t sending out, check your Pending messages section and look for the warning tags that might include DND (Quiet hours) or Max message price which will be explained in another article.