Countdown in Message Builder

Countdown timers are an attractive feature you can place in your emails to draw the attention of your customers to certain dates, such as Black Friday. This article explains how to create a timer that counts down the time to 7 a.m. on Black Friday.

Adding a timer to your design

In the Message Builder, drag the countdown timer tile to a block in the design then click on the Edit Timer to continue. 

Select End on date and select November 27th in Date & Time field, from the calendar. Then select 7 a.m. and the time zone for the event. In the example, it's UTC+2:00 (Europe/Paris).

The timer is already working, measuring time towards Black Friday.

The size of the timer image is provided to help you include it in your design, e.g., by cutting the surrounding images.

Timer options

Besides Date &Time, the countdown timer provides a number of options that can be used to change its appearance.

• Timer Type - Allows you to choose if the timer is set with a fixed end date or when customer opens the mail.
• Timer Style: 3 styles are available -
  
  
  • the classical:
    
    
  • the arcs:
    
    
  • the blocks:
    
    

• Size, Colors, Fonts, Background Image - Those settings will allow you to completely customize your timer (digits and letters can be customized separately with many fonts or colors).
• Expiration Image - This allows you to drag an image that will be displayed after the countdown has ended.
• Language - You can change the displayed language of the countdown (days, hours, minutes and seconds).

Impact of iOS 15 Privacy policy

The countdown module of Splio Message Builder is generating a repeating gif of the timer (1 minute of the countdown). This gif is generated (and so is the start date) when your customers attempt to load the image, so for most of them when they open the email that is containing the countdown. In this case, the countdown reflects perfectly the correct time until the end date.

With iOS15, Apple released a new feature called Mail Privacy Protection. When the user chooses to enable it (40 to 50% adoption rate), Apple’s servers are downloading the image before the user opens the email. Your countdown will be well generated and the customer will be able to see it but the remaining time will be related to when Apple’s servers have downloaded the image, not necessarily when your customer has opened the email.

For most of your customers, the impact is very low and they will not see the difference because most of the users that usually open your emails will do it in the first hour of receiving (or nearly). However, keep in mind that if a user comes back to the email they will have false information (it will be the same image as the first open).