Timezones matter

Picture this … it’s just after 1am right now … the dead of the night here on the weekend … all’s quiet in the neighborhood, everyone is tucked in their warm cozy beds … lights are out … even the cat is curled up dreaming of what he might get to chase and stalk tomorrow.

Ring ring riiiiiiiiing! Off goes the phone at full pitch: a rather startling sound to snap you out of your sleep in the middle of the night. The first thought, of course, is that it’s a family emergency call … who else would call at 1:01am? Maybe someone has had an accident or needs help?

Grabbing the phone, I notice the caller ID says “Unavailable” … which means a call from overseas. Picking it up, I hear a pre-recorded voice broadcast …

“Hi, this is Bill Glazer and I just wanted to …”

Slam!

A voice broadcast … at 1am on a Sunday morning! Are you kidding?

My ONLY response to this kind of call is to slam down the phone and not feel the least bit impressed about the caller or their campaign.

My only guess is that at 1:01am in the middle of the night in Melbourne Australia is the equivalent of some decent hour of the day in the USA for this kind of telemarketing.

But if you have a global mailing/calling list, you could do much better taking into account that a suitable time of day to call is different according to what timezone your customers live in!

(You wouldn’t even have to ask for the info: the country code and area code in the phone number gives you an indication, especially for land line numbers).

This timezone concept also applies to the “launches” now undertaken for many online products that go on sale at a set time.

For example, “12 noon this Friday” for sometime in the eastern United States is a whole lot different for us Aussies. Yet very few campaigns factor in to their communication a way to help their list figure out what the time will be where they live.

It’d be easy enough to include more than one timezone in the pre-launch messages (maybe covering 5 or 6 high profile locations around the world) … or at least setup a link to an online time service so visitors can easily work out what “12 noon on Friday” will mean to them locally.

And if you’re going to use voice broadcasts in your campaign, know enough about your global mailing list to help prevent unwelcome phone calls in the dead of the night!