How do I create a segment based on time zone?

[Jacob_Giberson]

Hi, 

I am creating a RTP web campaign that is needing to change a webinar date based on the time zone. My current approach is by creating segments that include all the states that are in a time zone. The problem is that some states are in multiple time zones. 

Does anyone have a solution they like for this?

Thanks,

Jake

[Tamara_Johnson]

Hi Jake,

I'm not sure if you are using the Event Program to capture your webinar registrations/attendees but did you think of doing an Email Send outside the program with a custom email?

What I would do is create a static list of everyone you invited (Member of Program) from the event program, and use this as your batch for the Email Send program. Then in the dashboard of the new Email Send program just check Recipient Time Zone. It won't hurt your Event Program if you send the email outside of it, since you are alerting registered or invited guests.

In your spare time, you can create Smart Lists with filters by state - and call the Smart Lists: EST, PST, CST, MT, Hawaii (HST) and Alaska (AKST) yes you will experience some overlap but not too much cause concern. Your contacts will be in their own lists. The only caveat are leads who do not have state, city, or zip in their contact data - if they come from Google, FB, or any form that did not collect that data, or your trade shows, you will miss out on them getting into those smart lists.

The custom smart lists are time consuming but it's a 1 and done scenario. Then you can use those lists to make new campaigns/promotions/nurtures for locales. Just look for a map online and go by states, and the timeline borders will be visible enough to view. On your send schedule for the batch list (once you have the smart lists finalized) you'll set the send time to correspond to each and then have a staggered send per batch run. So if your in LA and your send to folks in NY just do the conversation on PST vs EST, and go from there.

For the webinar - do the Email Send as a solution - it will be a little faster.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Not seeing how this relates to an RTP Web Campaign, since there need not be an email sent at all.

[Jacob_Giberson]

Thanks for the suggestion. This is unfortunately not really relevant, basically I am asking about using the Real Time Personalization to change content on a page based on a user's time zone. 

Thanks,

Jake

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

To answer your question about the RTP interaction more directly, if you want to alter the displayed time of a webinar based on the person's Time Zone Offset — this is usually what people mean when they say "time zone" unless you specifically must display the name of the time zone — this is easily done using JS.

If you need to display the canonical name of the time zone, this is not possible in IE (any version) but is possible in all other modern browsers (FF/Edge/Chrome/Saf and mobile versions).

[Jacob_Giberson]

Thanks for this suggestion, I did a quick test to understand more at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Date/getTimezoneOff... and sure enough the javascript getTimezoneOffset is able to read a user's time zone. I think this solution should work.

Thanks,

Jake