Time of Day: Email Measurements

[Anonymous]

Hi, 

We have a need to have a tag on emails opened of just the Time of Day with the appropriate time zone. I.e. 9:00 AM PST

Has anyone ever done something list this and what was your solution and success? 

Thanks,

Kait

[Josh_Hill13]

I'm confused what exactly do you need?

[Iryna_Zhuravel4 · Accepted solution]

Do you mean that you want to know what emails were opened at 9:00 AM PST?

You can achieve this through Email Analysis report in RCE, it shows everything in CST, but it's pretty easy to do the math. There is a good video on how to use that report in the University

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

If you have the data as to location of the customer (time zones are weird though the way they break in counties and such), you should be able to extrapolate this from the email performance reports.

It may require exporting to excel for data manipulation/computation.

I have done similar things by exporting the results and then manipulating in excel.

If evaluating open rates based on time of send, I've definitely done evaluation on this with my past employer, and find it varies by industry, but that there is a generally good range to target for sends.

[Anonymous]

Thanks all for the replies. 

I am really looking for a way to do this in like a custom field that requires no manual manipulation in excel.

I essentially, want to use something like the {{system.date}} but I want it to be the time they came in or the time they opened an email, filled out a form ect and I need it by the timezone they came in.

Geoffrey, how did you evaluate the opens by time zone with your previous employer? I am looking  for a way to do that as well that's clean. 

Thanks!

Kaitlyn

[Anonymous]

Kaitlyn Butler​ - you can create an Interesting Moment that is triggered off them opening their specific email. Unfortunately, you won't be able to catch the time zone they opened it in, Marketo only sees one time zone per instance.

But you can get a cumulative view of *when* your emails are opened overall to get smarter about when you should send out your emails!

In your campaign:

1. Trigger/Smart List: Opens Email = Name of Email
2. Flow:
   1. Interesting moment with trigger, and system date/time
   2. Interesting moment history update
   3. 

You could also create a field like "Last email opened" and "Opened Email history" if you want to get super granular.

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

I would actually recommend against this, aside from a limited run, as opens are not always a true "Interesting Moment" from a Sales perspective.

In addition, this will add onto your lead's Activity Log this extra entry, which is already available via the Email activity in the Log.

By adding more data to the Activity Log, you can inherently slow down your instance of Marketo whereby when creating reports and smart lists it will take longer to provide results due to having to parse through the additional entries.

[Anonymous]

Not if it's only for specific emails.. And it doesn't have to be the Interesting Moment field. It could be any field for that matter. It makes sense to be wary about what you're populating, for sure, but depending on what the need is, a third party integration may not be necessary!

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

Kaitlyn Butler​, it is easiest if you first have some kind of geographic identifier on the leads (address prefered, or phone number) so that you can segment them into the respective time zones (TZs).

With my former employer, one of our SFDC developers built a zip/postal to TZ table, but I'm not sure where that data came from.  I'm sure you can Google and get it from somewhere.

From there we used this table to cross reference the user's TZ in a new column in our exported results.

Then it's a calculation (or Excel formula) to do the math of TZ differential from the system date of open.

Not exactly the simplest of tasks, but let me know if you need further explanation.

-Geoff

[Anonymous]

Thank you all for the helpful feedback.  I think I am going to try the RCE report that geoffrey krajeski​ recommended. 

-Kaitlyn