BS3
How do you manage email communication across time zones?
With subscribers scattered all around the globe handling time zones is a key challenge for email marketers. Do you segment your list based on time zones or do you send your emails at the same time to all your subscribers? Does you ESP offer a feature for time zone management?
I work with a bunch of ESPs, some of them offer an option (not a direct, send by time zone) but if you can optimize sending, in theory, it should send to subscribers at an appropriate time for their time zone. For the ESPs that don't offer that option, I've set up filters on the subscribers, billing address, address, or the website ID we collect upon opt-in (depending on the country site they're browsing on) and stagger sends based on that.
My current ESP (Vero) is a bit new to the scene but it does time zone management and internationalization as an option per campaign, probably one of it's more useful features which I don't really need to use as I'm working at a US-only company.
When I worked for an international company previously, we used their language and country code (determined by ingestion from browser headers at signup) then made assumptions on time zone from there, localizing send time for marketing campaigns but not for transactional.
I only have location information for about 35% of my database, but for those customers, I do launch by time zone, by building a program that does timed launches according to location filters. I get a much better open rate for the time zone launches than for general launches.