# Scheduling Campaigns

Schedule campaigns to send at a future date and time.

Rather than sending a campaign immediately, you can schedule it to go out at a specific date and
time. This is useful when you want emails to arrive during peak engagement hours, coordinate
sends with a product launch, or simply prepare campaigns in advance and not worry about
remembering to send them manually.

## How to Schedule a Campaign

Scheduling happens on the **Review & Send** step of the campaign builder, once
your details, audience and email are complete.

1. Build the campaign and click through to the **Review** step. Check the summary of
  name, subject, from address and audience.
2. Under **Schedule**, pick the date and time in the date-and-time field. It must be
  at least a minute in the future.
3. Click the schedule button. The campaign status changes to **Scheduled** and you
  are taken to its page, which shows when it will send.

> Scheduled campaigns are picked up by a background job that runs about once a minute, so
> sending starts within a minute or so of the chosen time.
> 

## Timezones

The date-and-time field uses your **browser's local timezone** — the one your computer
or phone is set to. SendBeam stores the moment in UTC and shows it back to you in your local time
on the campaign page.

If your audience is mostly in another timezone, work out the local send time there and enter the
equivalent in yours. For example, to reach New York at 9 am from London during British Summer
Time, schedule for 2 pm.

> If you schedule from a laptop set to a different timezone than you expect (for example while
> travelling), the campaign will go out at the wrong moment. Double-check the time shown on the
> campaign page after scheduling, especially around daylight saving changes.
> 

## Editing or Cancelling a Scheduled Send

A scheduled campaign can still be edited and can be cancelled at any point before its send time.

To cancel a scheduled send:

1. Open the campaign from the **Campaigns** list.
2. Click the **Cancel** button at the top of the page and confirm.
3. The campaign's status becomes **Cancelled**. It will not send.

To change a scheduled campaign's content, audience or time, click **Edit** on its
page; the builder reopens with everything filled in. Sending or scheduling from the Review step
replaces the previous schedule.

> A cancelled campaign cannot be sent again. If you still want to send it, use
> **Duplicate** on its page to create a fresh draft with the same content.
> 

When the scheduled time arrives, SendBeam resolves the audience and checks that the workspace can
send. If the audience has become empty, the send would exceed the account's monthly email
allowance, or sending is paused, the campaign is set to **Cancelled** instead of
sent. The reason is shown on the campaign's page and as a tooltip on its status in the Campaigns
list, and every admin of the workspace receives an email explaining why, with a link to the
campaign. Duplicate it to send again once the problem is fixed.

## Spreading a send over a few hours

The Details step has a **Pace** setting: as fast as your plan allows, or spread over two hours up to two days.
Spreading a large send is kinder to a new sending domain and to inbox placement, and it keeps replies arriving at a rate you
can answer. A workspace admin can set a default pace under Settings → General, and their own hourly cap below the plan's;
a campaign's own pace wins over the default. A send in progress shows its pace on the campaign page.

## Best Times to Send

On the Pro and Business plans a campaign can choose its own time per person: tick
**Send at each contact's best hour** on the Details step and each contact receives it at
the hour they usually open your emails — the most common hour of their opens over the last six months,
once there are at least three — within a day of the start. Contacts without enough opens receive it at
the start. The campaign shows as sending for up to a day; **Stop sending** on its page
ends it early, keeping what has gone out. A campaign does this or runs an A/B test, not both, and
the timing follows the hour in UTC, which is where a habit already shows.

While the ideal send time depends on your specific audience, industry benchmarks offer a useful
starting point:

- **Tuesday to Thursday** consistently outperform Monday and Friday for B2B
  audiences, as recipients are less distracted by start-of-week and end-of-week tasks.
- **Mid-morning (9 am – 11 am)** in your audience's local timezone tends to catch
  people when they are working through their inbox after morning tasks.
- **Early afternoon (1 pm – 2 pm)** is another peak window, particularly for
  consumer-facing emails.
- **Avoid late Friday afternoons and weekends** unless your audience is known to
  engage then — many emails sent at these times are buried or deleted unread.

> The best way to find your audience's optimal send time is to test it: run an
> [A/B test on the send time](https://sendbeam.io/docs/campaigns/creating#subject-line-test), which sends the same
> email to a sample at two or more times and sends the rest at the time that did better. Use what you learn to schedule future
> campaigns more effectively.
>

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Source: https://sendbeam.io/docs/campaigns/scheduling