About SMS Quiet Hours

In Mailchimp, set up quiet hours to avoid sending text messages at times that your subscribed SMS contacts don’t want to receive them. This includes early in the morning, late in the evening, or on the weekend, depending on your SMS marketing program.

In this article, you'll learn about SMS quiet hours for countries with an SMS marketing program.

Things to know

Here are some things to know.

• SMS Marketing is available as an add-on feature for customers with the Essentials plan or higher.
• Before you can send marketing text messages, you need to submit an application and be approved.
• You need credits to send SMS and MMS (US and Canada only) with Mailchimp. To learn more, check out About SMS Marketing Credits.
• At this time, you can only send text messages to subscribed SMS contacts from the country that’s associated with your SMS Marketing program. If you have registered senders in multiple countries, you can send messages to subscribed contacts in each country you're registered for. For example, if you have a sender registered in the UK and one registered in the US, you can send text messages to subscribed SMS contacts in the UK and the US.

How it works

Anyone using SMS as a channel to reach their audience has a time window when they can do so. Anything outside that window is known as quiet hours. SMS quiet hours allow users to set a specific time window during which they can send text messages. Users can choose when the quiet period starts and ends; however, you’re responsible for knowing the quiet hours and other applicable sending restrictions, such as public holidays, within your SMS programs country.

Quiet hours adapt to the time zone of your recipients to make sure that your subscribed SMS contacts only receive messages when they should. For example, let's say you're in California and you have an SMS contact in New York. If you send an SMS at 7 PM PST, your recipient in New York won't get it until quiet hours end the next day. Similarly, if you're in New York and you have an SMS contact in California, an SMS sent at noon ET won't be delivered until quiet hours end in PST. If you're sending to multiple countries, the quiet hours of the contact's country will be honored at send time.

For some countries, quiet hours are customizable. If you don't make changes to your SMS Marketing program during quiet hours, the default settings in each country apply.

As a default setting, your primary country, sending number, and quiet hours are displayed. Be sure your preferred country and sending number is listed before sending SMS messages.

Quiet hours can be setup for multi-countries and multi-audiences. Multi-countries and multi-audiences can be added during the SMS marketing program setup and changed from the Opt-in preferences located in the SMS settings by selecting the Double Opt-in option.

Once the Double Opt-in option is enabled, multi-audiences can receive SMS from a sending country.

Set up custom quiet hours

To customize quiet hours for your SMS marketing program, follow these steps.

1. Click SMS.
2. Click Settings.
3. Click Country Settings.
4. The primary sending country number is set by default. To change the sending country, click the drop-down arrow in the sending number field to select a preferred country.
5. In the Quiet hours section, click the drop-down to set preferred quiet hours and timezone. Use the recommended Quiet hours by county table provided below to input the best hours.
6. Click Update to save your changes.

Repeat steps 4 and 5 for each country.

That’s it! You’ve now defined the quiet hours for your program. Next, you can learn more about quiet hour requirements based on the country.

Quiet hours by country

Here's a breakdown of countries with SMS programs and the quiet hours they must follow.

Next steps

Now that you know more about Mailchimp’s SMS Marketing, check out these resources to get started.

About SMS Marketing with Mailchimp Learn about SMS marketing in Mailchimp.

Import SMS Marketing Contacts to Mailchimp If you have contacts who have already opted in to your SMS marketing, import them to your Mailchimp audience with a CSV or TXT file.

Create and Send a Marketing SMS Learn how to create and send SMS marketing messages to your subscribed contacts.