Sure. The logic is pretty straight forward. I use one of the two segment logic templates for creating all of the different time zone segments, which I then approve and use in the flows as outlined in the email flow listed out above.
State Dependent Time Zone Segments
FILTER LOGIC: (1 and (2 or (3 and 4))) or (5 and 6 and (7 or (8 and 9)))
Country IS United States;Canada
State IS <Appropriate State or Providence for the time zone segment>
State IS EMPTY
Inferred State Region IS <Appropriate State or Providence for the time zone segment>
COUNTRY IS EMPTY
Inferred Country IS United States;Canada
State IS <Appropriate State or Providence for the time zone segment>
State IS EMPTY
Inferred State Region IS <Appropriate State or Providence for the time zone segment>
Non-State Dependent Time Zone Segments
FILTER LOGIC: 1 or (2 and 3)
Country IS <Appropriate Countries>
Country IS EMPTY
Inferred Country IS <Appropriate Countries>
The State Dependent one is a little complicated to read at first, but basically it's prioritizing the known values for the country and state over the inferred, but allowing either to influence the time zone segment. If the country/state is known, use that, otherwise assign the time zone segment with the inferred data. I prefer to use the reported data over the inferred data since the inferred data is based on IP lookup and that isn't always accurate when working with enterprises.
We ask for country and state (where applicable) on our forms, but you can always use Data.com or another enrichment source for those values. I've seen Data.com typically get around 70% match rate for a confidence of 7+ and I wasn't okay with only getting 70% of our database into a segment so I didn't bank on Data.com data for this. Again, it's all about personal preference and tolerance.
As for which source to use for identifying which country/state to put under which time zone, you can use something like http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/time-zone/ or even just Google Images if you'd really like. Ultimately, you have to use your best judgement at times because there are some states/countries that are in 2+ timezones and you have to decide how granular and specific you want to be. For example, Russia spans multiple time zones, but we just lump it all into one time zone because we don't have much sales focus on Russia anyway, so I didn't see the need to build complex rules to support a region we don't target as a company.
This seems to be a pretty hot topic among users. While self serving, Seventh Sense, a LaunchPoint partner, offers a send time personalization and email analytics system. In short, it goes a bit deeper than the traditional send time optimization or time zone sending and analyzes when each contact has opened and clicked on emails, scores those events differently (we want to hit people when they're more likely to click than open), builds a profile on each contact (visible and can be exported to deliver your sales team the same insight) and then rather than blasting to the entire list, you schedule the list with Seventh Sense (Marketo still delivers, etc.) and each contact will receive his or her email at their most optimal time. Benefits of this approach include increased engagement, decreases in unsubs, increased deliverability, activating dormant contacts and providing a bit of an insurance policy when you find out that you have a bad link, wrong date, etc. within your email.
We're also actively working on an artificial intelligence layer which will spot content fatigue so that you can automatically opt down contacts from receiving emails so that they don't get annoyed and unsubscribe or worse, dis-engage with your brand which will create a graymail problem.
.png)