What are quiet hours?
Quiet hours are night time hours when people may be asleep or otherwise not wish to receive automated text messages. Messages sent during these hours may produce a bad experience for users and some SMS laws prohibit sending automated messages during these evening hours for marketing purposes.
What is Community’s Quiet Hour Protection?
For automated messages that have Community’s Quiet Hour Protection enabled, those messages will not be sent between 8pm and 10:59am ET (5pm - 7:59am PT) as shown in the chart below. Those messages will be held and resent after the quiet hour window ends. This helps ensure that those messages are not sent between 8pm and 8am in any of North America’s four major timezones listed below, even when a member’s timezone and/or location are unknown. The window will shift by one hour based on observance of daylight savings times in the Eastern Time Zone.
Which messages are subject to Quiet Hours Protection?
Community’s Quiet Hour Protection will be applied to automated messages that have a delay attached (for example: delay sending for 3 hours after being triggered). This includes, for example, delayed messages in an Automated Welcome Series.
Community’s Quiet Hour Protection will not be applied to direct messages, campaigns (including scheduled campaigns), or automated messages that are set to send immediately after being triggered (such as Keyword Responders).
When will these messages be sent?
An automated message that is blocked during quiet hours shown above will be sent soon after that quiet hours window ends (e.g., 11am ET or 8am PT). Generally, the message will be sent immediately after the quiet hour window ends, but there may be a short delay based on queuing. If a message subject to Quiet Hour Protection is part of a series of delayed messages, delays set to subsequent messages in the series will be based on the send time of the initial delayed message.
An example:
You schedule three messages in an automated welcome series. The first message is “Hello!”, set to send immediately. The second message is “What’s Up?” and is set to send 4 hours after your initial welcome message. The third message is “Hi Again!” set to send 3 hours later. If a member texts your number at 4pm ET, they’ll receive a welcome message (“Hello!”) immediately at 4pm ET, a message saying “What’s Up?” at 11am ET the next day, and then a message saying “Hi again” at 2pm ET.