Communicating with contacts with the right messaging at the right time is important. By setting day-of-week and time-of-day communication settings for an automation will ensure you're sending emails and texts at the best times to reach your audience.
Any automation, both contact-based and transaction-based, can have unique day-of-week and/or time-of-day set to ensure communications go out in the time and day range we intend. For example, we have a New Lead automation that we want to communicate only between the hours of 2 pm and 8pm, when most folks are more willing to read, respond or interact with our communications and the information contained.
No matter if we're updating an existing automation, building a new automation or copying down a Playbook automation, settings the day-of-week and/or time-of-day is quick and straightforward.
Add Allowed Communications Times
After entering any automation, go to the 'Automation Behavior' section, toggle 'on' the 'Allowed Communications Times'.
When enabled, the 'Allowed Communications Times' settings will slide-out on the right. From here, we can quickly set the days-of-week and time-of-day. Since this option is now enabled, we must choose both in order to 'Save'.
In the following animated GIF, we'll demonstrate setting days-of-week to Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Then time-of-day to 3pm until 7pm.
It's important to note that when setting the time-of-day, it will always display the 'team time zone'. All time settings will adhere to our team's current time zone. To learn how to update Team Settings, click here.
🚧 The TCPA prohibits sending text messages before 8:00 am and after 9:00 pm. Emails will still send, but SMS/text messages scheduled to send outside of these hours will be queued and sent at the next available time. It's incredibly important that if you use SMS actions that allowed sending time includes at least some day-time hours.
Edit Allowed Communications Times
To change the time and date range for sending, after an automation is setup, simply locate and open the automation.
Scroll to the 'Automation Behavior' section and click the 'edit' icon to the right of 'Allowed Communications Times'.
The 'Allowed Communications Times' settings will slide-out on the right, and with the previous settings we saved. At this point, we can update any of the settings and they will take effect as soon as the automation is saved.
In the following GIF, we'll demonstrate turning off Wednesday, turning on Tuesday and then updating the time to allow sending 1-hour earlier.
After saving the automation, any changes made will immediately go into effect on that automation. If we make the edits at 10am on Wednesday, the next communication will go out on Friday at 2pm (in our Team's time zone).
👍 This concludes setting-up and editing automation allowed communications times.