Everyone knows that calling a lead too early in the morning or too late in the evening is a sure way to start off on the wrong foot. But how do you deal with the myriad of time zones? You could try relying on the visitor’s state, but there are 15 states that span more than one time zone. You also have oddities like Arizona, where daylight saving time isn’t observed.

An easy solution is to gather the visitor’s time zone when they fill out a web form. This takes a few steps, including adding a custom field to store the time zone, and modifying a web form to automatically fill a hidden field with the visitor’s time zone. To see this tip in action, check out our demo web form.

If you aren’t familiar with creating custom fields, please review the documentation at the Infusionsoft website. You’ll need to create a custom Text field for the Contact Record. We called ours Timezone.

Next, you need to find the field’s database name. On the custom fields page, click the View the field database names (for the API) link. This will open a new window that lists your custom fields and their database names. As you can see in the screenshot, our field’s database name is Timezone0. Write this down, you’ll need it later.

Our field’s database name is Timezone0

Add your time zone field to your web form as a Hidden field. This will make the field invisible to the visitor, but will still allow the time zone to be saved to Infusionsoft.

Next we need to add some JavaScript that will automatically determine the visitor’s time zone, and save it to your time zone field. Edit your web form and add an HTML Snippet with this code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jstimezonedetect/1.0.4/jstz.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
// <![CDATA[
jQuery(document).ready(function(){
    var timezone = jstz.determine();
    jQuery('#inf_custom_FIELDNAME').val(timezone.name());
});
// ]]>
</script>

You’ll need to make one change to the code. Replace FIELDNAME with the field’s database name you retrieved earlier. For our example, we would replace it with Timezone0.

Here is a screenshot of the code in action on a simple web form with a visible time zone field:

Time zone automatically filled in by our HTML Snippet

You can see that America/Chicago was automatically selected. I live in San Antonio, which is in the Central time zone, so America/Chicago (also the Central time zone) is the correct choice.

Future tips will help you turn the IANA time zone location into something a little more useful, but I highly recommend starting to collect time zones now even if you don’t plan on using them yet. It takes just a few minutes to set up and gives you a lot of flexibility in the future, such as sending emails at a precise time regardless of where your lead lives.