The email that lands at iftar

The basket email fires one hour after the basket is left.

Somebody chose that hour years ago, in a template, and it was a sound choice. Long enough to be past whatever interrupted her, short enough that the thing is still wanted.

This month it means the email arrives at the minute the family sits down.

The rest of the programme is built the same way. A nine in the morning send, because nine in the morning tests well in London. A three day gap. A quiet window overnight, which here is the only window anybody is reading in. Send time optimisation trained on eleven months of an ordinary day, now confidently choosing the hour when the entire country is at a table.

None of it is badly written. All of it is loyal to a day that stopped existing on the first of the month.

The customer does not read it as a scheduling error. She reads it as a company that does not know what month it is, and that is a small thing in an ordinary week and a large one now, because this is the month she notices who is paying attention.

The fix everybody reaches for is the copy. A greeting at the top, a softer subject line, the same email at the same hour.

The fix is the calendar. The delay windows, the quiet hours, the send times, the day of week rules, every one of them moved on the first night of the month and moved back at the end of it.

An automation has no idea what day it is. It knows what it was told, by somebody thinking about a different day, in a different place, a long time ago.