Timing and Delays with Drift Email Bots

Guidelines for email bot sending

• We do not send emails on weekends or US holidays
• However, we do count weekends and holidays as part of your delays between emails
• You can customize the delay between each email in your sequence
• All campaign emails that are sent automatically (i.e. all but the first email when a campaign is first enabled) are sent based on the recipient's timezone and the most likely windows for email opens
• List syncs from your MAP happen nightly at midnight UTC. This means any contacts new to a synced list won't be emailed until the next business day.

Holidays excluded from sending

• New Years' Day
• Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (third Monday in January)
• Presidents' Day (third Monday in February)
• Memorial Day (last Monday in May)
• 4th of July
• Labor Day (first Monday in September)
• Indigenous Peoples Day (second Monday in October)
• Veterans Day (November 11)
• Thanksgiving (fourth Thursday in November)
• Christmas Day

Send times

Using our own data, Drift has defined four windows of times during which recipients are most likely to open emails. These windows are 5:30am-6:30am, 9:30am-10:30am, 1:30pm-2:30pm, and 8:00pm-11:00pm. We will randomly select one of these windows for all campaign emails that we send automatically. They will be sent according to the recipient's timezone if it is known, otherwise we will use the timezone you've set for your Drift Chat account.

Example scenarios

What if I try to start a new campaign on a weekend or holiday?

No emails will send out on that weekend/holiday. Emails will begin sending the next applicable day, and there is no way to override this behavior currently.

How do you check if there are weekends or holidays during a campaign?

When we send the first email, the second email is immediately queued to send after its specified delay. For example, if Email 1 is sent Monday, August 10 (and there’s a 2-day delay), Email 2 is immediately scheduled for Wednesday, August 12. When scheduling the next email, we check if the planned send day is a holiday or weekend. In this scenario, since Wednesday is a business day and August 13 is not a holiday, we will send it on that day as planned.

What if I change my email delay times while my campaign is live?

Changes to delays will not take effect for any contacts who are already in that delay.

For example: Email 1 goes out Monday; Email 2 is on a 2-day delay for Wednesday. If you change the delay on Tuesday, everyone who is already waiting for Email 2 will still get the email on Wednesday, on the old delay.

However, if you send Email 1 and then update the delay between Email 2 and 3 (which no one has reached yet) - this change will take effect for the contacts already in the sequence.

What if I delete an email from a live campaign?

We do not recommend deleting emails from live campaigns.

If you delete an email out of a live campaign, contacts receiving that email next will exit the campaign entirely. However, contacts at earlier or later stages of the campaign will continue through the new version.

What if someone enters my audience list on a Friday afternoon?

At midnight UTC time, we sync with your connected MAP to get the latest version of the audience list. If you're also using exclusion lists, from midnight UTC to 2 hours later we reserve this time for syncing exclusion lists as well. After this period, if any contacts due to their timezone still fall within the last smart send window (8pm - 11pm their time), we'll send their email out. If you're not using exclusion lists, we'll do the same check against the recipients' timezones - if any emails could go out in the last window due to their timezone, we'll send it out.