Delivery Duration, Overnight Hours, and Message Send Time

Overview

Delivery duration is a time displayed as part of a "checklist" before you send out a text message under Compose. This information is shown to keep you informed as to when you can expect your message to be delivered to its recipient(s). Based on the number of recipients, the delivery duration will grow. This article will explain the factors involved in generating the delivery duration and also explain sending warnings related to delivery time.

This article will cover:

Factors impacting send time
Send warnings and overnight hours
Undelivered messages due to overnight hours
Message queue

Throttling

In order to prevent carrier violations, messages are throttled to go out in 12-second increments. That means if you are sending to, say, three recipients at once, it will take 36 seconds for the first person to the third person to receive the message. If you are sending to larger numbers of recipients at once, the 12-second throttling will add up to a larger time period.

If you are attempting to send to a large group of recipients and the delivery duration falls between 10pm - 6am, Cadence will prevent you from sending the message.

8pm Warning Message

If the message delivery duration will cause some messages to be sent after 8pm, a warning will be displayed to notify you. If you are not concerned with messages being delivered that late, you can choose to click [ Send Anyway] and then send out the message. If you would rather wait, you can either cancel the message entirely or schedule it for a future date/time.

Message Queue

In addition to throttling, each phone number in Cadence also had an associated message "queue." The queue accounts for the order that text messages will go out from that phone number and how long it will take to send more messages.

For example, if you send a text to 50 contacts, then you immediately go back into Compose and set up a message to 40 contacts, the 50 from your previous message will receive their messages first. The message to the other 40 contacts will be queued behind them and will only start sending after the 50 messages in your queue have gone out.

Note that individual replies to contacts (i.e., 1-1 messages) do not have to wait for the queue to be cleared and will be sent within 12 seconds.

Sent Messages Details

After clicking "Send", you'll be able to see sending details, including progress of sending in the sent folder.

Clicking into the sent folder will provide:

Your current queue of messages and the order in which they will send.
The current sending progress (ex: has sent to 5 of 10 recipients)
A preview of the message that is being sent
Who the message is being sent to: It will display either contact or segment name.
Who sent the message
- If sent from a shared inbox, the shared inbox name will be displayed and who from that shared inbox sent that message.
What time the message was composed.

Click into the message to see details -- undelivered messages that show "Cancelled" were not sent due to overnight hours, or "quiet hours":

Undelivered messages due to quiet hours can be resent the next day. Filter by "Cancelled" and export to see which messages were undelivered due to quiet hours.

Overnight Hours

To be respectful of your recipients, Cadence features a built-in protection to prevent the sending of text messages at inappropriate times. Messages cannot be sent or scheduled between the hours of 10pm - 6am. If you are attempting to send to a large group of recipients and the delivery duration falls between 10pm - 6am, Cadence will display a warning message and prevent you from sending the message.

You can either cancel the message or schedule it to go out at a future date/time.

If you scheduled messages and they are queued up to send during overnight hours, we will send the messages until 10pm. At that point, all remaining queued messages will not be sent.

Individual, one-off messages can be sent during overnight hours.

Note: See Why can't I send text messages between 10pm-6am? for more information