Scheduling Emails Across Time Zones in Outlook: Best Practices
Scheduling emails across various time zones is a breeze with the right tools. Learn how to schedule emails in Outlook across different time zones and the best practices to follow.
Living in today’s interconnected world has its advantages and disadvantages. The pandemic has significantly altered the landscape, making remote work and client outreach more feasible, regardless of geographical boundaries.
Whether you reside in New York or your client is based in Tokyo, geographical distance is no longer a hindrance in our digital age. Even if your business caters to a global audience, you can leverage various communication channels to connect and engage with clients, with email being one of the most prominent.
Email marketing provides a seamless means of connecting with customers, irrespective of location. Due to its ease of use, email is a vital customer acquisition and retention driver, with more than 81% of SMBs relying on it.
However, determining the optimal time to send emails and ensuring maximum receptivity is still a challenge.
This article addresses the difficulties of scheduling emails across different time zones. I will focus on how to schedule emails in Outlook across different time zones, followed by the best practices.
Without further delay, let’s dive in.
How to schedule emails in Outlook across different time zones
Let’s look at this scenario:
You need to send an email to a customer located in the Eastern Standard Time (EST) zone, and you are based in Pacific Standard Time (PST). You, the sender, are located in Los Angeles, which is in the Pacific Standard Time (PST) zone. Your customer, the recipient, is based in New York operating in the Eastern Standard Time (EST) zone.
Now imagine you want to send an important business update to your customer in New York and ensure it reaches them at the most convenient time in their local EST time zone.
Here’s how you can schedule this email via Outlook (Desktop Version):
- Open Outlook and click on ‘New Email’ option
- Write your email as you usually would
- Instead of sending it immediately, navigate to the “Options” tab in the email composition window.
- Click “Delay Delivery” or a similar option, depending on your Outlook version.
- Set the delivery date and time according to the recipient’s time zone (EST in this case).
- Outlook will automatically adjust the schedule based on the time zone settings.
Note: Delayed messages will only be sent if your Outlook is running. So, you must keep a sending time keeping that in mind. Additionally, the delay delivery feature is only available on Outlook desktop and not on the web.
Another method to schedule your Outlook email delivery is by using the ‘Schedule Send’ feature available on the Outlook Web version.
For this, you just need to click on the ‘New Email’ option and compose your email. Instead of ‘Send’ click on ‘Schedule Send’ from the dropdown (check the image below):
You can select the specific time you want your email to go out.
If needed, you can double-check the delivery time to ensure it aligns with your recipient’s business hours in the EST zone. Save and send the email confidently, knowing it will reach your customer at an appropriate time in their local time zone.
Remember that the options you see while scheduling the emails might differ depending on your Outlook version. For more information, you can also check out this source.
Scheduling email is ideal when you want your email to be at the top of someone’s inbox when they start their workday. In email marketing campaigns, you can schedule emails at specific times when your target audience is most likely to engage, increasing the chances of your message being noticed.
However, this process can become cumbersome when sending bulk emails. You will have to create batches of emails and categorize them. This is not only time-consuming but can result in errors. Here, it would be best if you considered using cold email automation tools like Smartlead to help you adapt automatically to different time zones.
Cold email automation tools are a practical solution designed for efficient email scheduling, ensuring your messages reach your audience optimally. Beyond timing, these tools offer features that enhance engagement and simplify email outreach.
With personalized scheduling and insightful analytics, they can be a valuable asset in refining your email campaigns.
Best practices to follow when scheduling emails across time zones
1. Understand Your Recipients’ Time Zones
When scheduling emails across different time zones — you must focus on familiarizing yourself with the time zones of your recipients. Know where they are located and when their typical business hours occur. This helps in choosing optimal delivery times.
You might wonder why managing the time zone is essential in email marketing.
Failing to deliver your emails at the appropriate time can result in emails being delivered at inconvenient times, like recipients’ non-working hours or even in the middle of the night. It reflects a lack of consideration for the recipients’ circumstances and may result in lower response rates.
Tools like Outlook can automate the entire process of scheduling and coordinating activities across different time zones.
2. Segment Your Email Lists
When sending cold emails to a geographically spread audience — you should strategically segment your email lists.
This allows you to tailor your email campaigns to specific regions and optimize delivery times accordingly.
When using tools like Outlook to schedule emails across different time zones, you should create separate batches for various segments. This allows you to send communications at times that are most convenient for each group and enables you to manage follow-ups and subsequent interactions more efficiently.
3. Test Delivery Times
Now, once you have segmented your email lists — how do you know the correct delivery slot for each segment? A/B testing your email delivery times can help you know that.
Instead of making assumptions about the most effective delivery times, A/B testing involves sending variations of your emails at different times to comparable segments of your audience and then analyzing the performance metrics to identify optimal time frames.
Monitor open rates and engagement metrics to refine your email scheduling strategy.
4. Don’t flood your recipients’ inboxes
An unforgivable mistake email marketers make is flooding their recipients’ inboxes with frequent, unsolicited cold emails. Sending out cold emails without strategic planning can result in low response rates and, worse, more unsubscribers. You don’t want that, do you?
Hence, resist the temptation to inundate recipients with frequent emails. Overdoing it can lead to email fatigue, causing subscribers to disengage or unsubscribe.
Strike a balance that respects your audience’s inbox and maintains the relevance of your messages.
5. Leverage cold emailing tools
As discussed in the previous section, cold email tools can help you automate the sending of bulk emails via Outlook.
These tools streamline prospect identification, enable personalized outreach at scale, automate follow-ups, and provide valuable analytics to optimize cold email campaigns.
When used correctly, these tools can help you increase your email deliverability and response rates.
Winding-Up
Mastering email scheduling across time zones in Outlook requires a strategic approach. By respecting recipients’ locations and business hours and utilizing Outlook’s features, you can communicate more professionally and create a positive brand image.
For a more streamlined approach, you must consider enhancing your Outlook’s capability by combining it with a powerful cold email automation tool.
