How to Avoid Time Zone Friction

ConvertMORE How-To

“When you confuse, you lose.”

Donald Miller, Bestselling Author of: Building a StoryBrand

Any detail of your communication that is confusing (even subtly) forces a prospect or customer to fire up their brain and think, to figure out how what you’re communicating applies to them, creates friction in the conversion flow.

So, while it may seem like a trivial detail, accuracy, relevance, and consistency regarding when, where, and how time and time zones for date/time-dependent offers are important. Additionally, consistency in the details is a signal of trust and credibility.

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Here are our guidelines and best practices based on common questions:

  1. Do or don’t include date/time details in the marketing copy?
    • DO on registration pages for live-delivered marketing events.
    • DO on offer sales pages when in-person attendance is required for the deliverable.
    • DO on offer sales pages when in-person attendance is optional, but take care to avoid making the schedule an easy objection.
    • DON’T make dates and times overly promient such as including it for every live module that a live-delivered course or program includes, when“Wednesdays at 3:00 pm Pacific / 6:00 pm Eastern, starting April 23rd” will suffice.
  2. Do or don’t include both the start and end times or date/time for multi-day events and offers?
    • DON’T include finish time in most situations.
    • DO include finish times in post-purchase information, especially if travel is involved.
  3. Which time zone or time zones should be included?
    • Present one timezone – works fine for mostly US audiences, especially if paired with Add-to-Calendar (A2C) links. Time converter links are also ok, but A2C links are preferred.
    • Present the two US coast time zones ordered earlier -> later, west -> east, or left -> right for those with a visual brain. For business on East Coast time, and business owners who “think” in East Coast time, using both coasts avoids East Coast bias, which many Pacific time zone residents (and others) are sensitive to.
    • Present all US-main continent time zones – overkill in most cases because people living in the middle time zones are accustomed to configuring their local time relative to their proximal coast, but a full display can be helpful for some audiences
    • Present select US and select international for businesses that draw a global audience. We have an Aussie client with more than 60% of their business in the US, as well as a significant percentage in Europe. For this client, the time zone array is presented as Los Angeles / New York / London / Sydney.
  4. Should the time zone name be used or the acronym?
    • The time zone spelled out: “Eastern,” or “Mountain,” is the clearest. If content space is a premium or the spelled-out version is visually overwhelming, the next best option is a 2-letter acronym: “ET” or “MT.”
    • Avoid adding an S (standard time) or D (daylight time) UNLESS you take great care to be accurate, which can be especially challenging and important in the spring and fall because the time change occurs on different dates depending upon the country and local policy.
  5. Establish a consistent protocol for your business based on what works best for your company and the audience you serve.
    • If you serve a global market, include global time zones; otherwise, don’t.
    • Standardize the details, including or not including minutes for top-of-the-hour times, upper or lower case am/PM.