Why Survey Email Timing Matters (And How Smart Send Fixes It)

Email open rates drop by over 30% when a message arrives outside of business hours. A survey invitation that lands at 2am local time — because your batch job ran at 9am UTC and your Berlin office is on CET — will sit unread until the employee's morning routine is already in full swing. By then, they've moved on to their task list and your survey never gets opened.

For global teams, this isn't a minor inconvenience. It's a systematic response rate problem that compounds with every campaign you run.

The timezone problem for distributed teams

Consider a company with offices in New York (UTC-5), London (UTC+0), and Singapore (UTC+8). If you schedule your survey send for 9am London time:

• New York receives it at 4am — before anyone is awake
• London receives it at 9am — perfect
• Singapore receives it at 5pm — end of day, when employees are wrapping up, not starting tasks

The result: your New York and Singapore response rates will be significantly lower than London's, and your data will be skewed toward the London perspective even if it's not the majority of your workforce.

How Smart Send works

TruePulse's Smart Send feature solves this at the infrastructure level. When you enable Smart Send on a campaign, TruePulse doesn't send all invitations at once. Instead, it:

1. Looks up each employee's locale setting (set when you import or add them to the directory)
2. Maps that locale to a primary timezone (e.g., "fr" → Europe/Paris, "en-US" → America/New_York)
3. Schedules each invitation to arrive at 9am in that employee's local timezone

A New York employee gets their survey at 9am Eastern. A Paris employee gets theirs at 9am CET. A Singapore employee gets theirs at 9am SGT. Same campaign, same survey, same cadence — just timed correctly for each person.

Setting up Smart Send

Smart Send is a checkbox on the "Customise the invitation" step of the campaign wizard. Enable it and TruePulse handles the rest. The only prerequisite is that your employees have locale settings configured — which is also what powers multi-language survey translation, so you may already have it set.

Campaign templates: remove the repetitive work

Once you've configured a campaign with the right audience, survey, schedule, and Smart Send settings, you can save it as a template for future campaigns. Templates store the audience segmentation, survey selection, recurrence pattern, and email copy — so launching next quarter's pulse survey takes 30 seconds instead of 15 minutes.

Go to Campaigns → Templates to manage your saved templates, or click "Save as template" from any campaign detail page.

Combined with AI question suggestions

Smart Send and campaign templates are most powerful when combined with TruePulse's other automation features. Use AI to select the right questions, campaign templates to save the configuration, and Smart Send to maximise response rates. You spend 10 minutes designing a campaign once, and then run it every month in under a minute.

Read more: How to improve survey response rates · TruePulse pulse survey software