How to send emails in the JO only on weekdays and skip weekends?
Answer: I have seen this use case and have wrongly used Continue function for this use case, so I want to make sure that others learn from my mistakes .
Here is how you can create a program so that you can send it out only on the weekdays:
1. Create a Salesforce formula field in the Customer Info/Company/Account object that determines the day of the week.
2. In the participant configuration, add this calculated field:
3. Your handy helper is the Conditional Wait. Say your program looks like this. The first email is sent out as soon as the program becomes active or it can be scheduled to run on a certain date. Point is you can skip weekends in the first step. But once you wait for 2 days, there is no guarantee if that day is a weekend. Either ways, you can have ConditIonal wait at any point during this program to check if today is a weekday or a weekend day.
Your conditional wait looks like this:
4. Note the logic above(this is on the right hand corner) is A OR B OR C....It defaults to AND and therefore you need to change that.
5. Also note the Time Limit as 3 days which means Wait up to 3 days in the conditional wait. This is telling the system to wait until one of the above conditions is true (because of the OR logic) for 3 days.
When it is in Wait, the program check until wait period (i.e for the next 3 days) for every 11 hours. So, let's say if the participant is added on Saturday then:
For the 1st 11 hrs, it is Saturday, so no email will be sent.
It checks again in next 11 hrs and it is still Saturday, so no email will be sent.
Then after next 11 hours it will be Sunday, so no email will be sent.
After 11 hours it will be Sunday, so no email will be sent
Then after 11 hours, it will be Monday, and according to the journey diagram above, the email will be sent.
Page 1 / 1
This is awesome Meenal! Thanks for sharing this creative solution!!
@meenal_shukla This is great! I did as you instructed, but when attempting to test this on a JO I created, the second email (after the conditional wait) doesn't get sent after the Contidional Wait is found to be valid.
Here is a screenshot of the Program:
Here's what the Conditional Wait looks like:
And here's the Preview of the Conditional Wait that shows the result is True/Valid:
Despite the Preview's results, I've yet to get the 2nd email to fire. Any ideas what could be causing the delay? Is it possibly caused by the Time Limit (3 days = 11 hours check)?
Update: the 2nd email was delivered, but not after 2 minutes like the timer is configured for. It appears the 11 hour timer built into the Conditional Wait is what will trigger the next email.
Is any progress being made to actually incorporate this into Journey Orchestrator functionality? This is quite a bit of work to not only incorporate this into each Program but each individual email step within each and every Program.
@abhishek_sivaraman : Any timelines on when this functionality is available OOB?
Hi all,
I would love to use this, but the original images are no longer available. Can you share again how you set this up? Thanks!
@All, I have updated the images, please have a view and let me know if you still see any issues.
Hi @meenal_shukla !!!!
So I’m looking to set this up in our instance, but we are using NXT. Does creating a formula on the company level in NXT allow you to do the same formula building like Salesforce?
From my time spent with it, it didn’t appear so, so I was wondering if you had any tips for doing this in NXT.
hi @Justin Bills ,
:-)
Data management > custom field on the object with a calculated field for Day of (This function returns the day of the week for a given date) and use today(need to confirm if today is provided - will get back to you) as the field to calculate off of.
This really needs to be an out of the box configuration option. +1
I want to skip weekends for the first email in a scheduled email chain program and send to participants who would’ve received the email on a weekend day on Mondays.
If I schedule the query to run M-F, will the filters and logic below work?
(Contract End Date is the field name that’s cut off.)
I have created an mda side formula field using similar logic and followed the strategy. This is not ideal though because the 11 hour evaluation delay is causing our sends to occur outside of business hours (which is the whole issue we are trying to avoid with not sending on weekends). If a participant enters a cw on Saturday at 9am and we have a timer of 66 hours, evaluations occur at Saturday 8pm, Sunday 7am, 6pm, and then 5am Monday, and the email is sent 5am Monday, which is too early.
Additionally, while the 11 hour cadence IS documented, the fact that the first evaluation does not occur when the participant enters the CW, but instead 11 hours after that point, is not. Participant enters at 1am saturday evaluations occur at Saturday 12pm, 11pm saturday, Sunday 10am, 9pm, and then it would be 8am Monday but the Timer ends at 1am Monday and so the last evaluation was 9pm on sunday and so the participants were knocked off.
Because this was not in the documentation, we did not build programs with this in mind and have had to clone our programs to make up for this, which of course impacts our ability to report on the programs. More importantly though, the initial timer set was too short and so a large chunk of our participants were knocked off because it was still sunday when the timer ran out. To resolve this we had to clone the program and add the drop outs to start on a truncated version of the program. And then we run into the same issues with reporting here as well.
End result is that what should have been 4 programs total has become 12.
I have created an mda side formula field using similar logic and followed the strategy. This is not ideal though because the 11 hour evaluation delay is causing our sends to occur outside of business hours (which is the whole issue we are trying to avoid with not sending on weekends). If a participant enters a cw on Saturday at 9am and we have a timer of 66 hours, evaluations occur at Saturday 8pm, Sunday 7am, 6pm, and then 5am Monday, and the email is sent 5am Monday, which is too early.
Additionally, while the 11 hour cadence IS documented, the fact that the first evaluation does not occur when the participant enters the CW, but instead 11 hours after that point, is not. Participant enters at 1am saturday evaluations occur at Saturday 12pm, 11pm saturday, Sunday 10am, 9pm, and then it would be 8am Monday but the Timer ends at 1am Monday and so the last evaluation was 9pm on sunday and so the participants were knocked off.
Because this was not in the documentation, we did not build programs with this in mind and have had to clone our programs to make up for this, which of course impacts our ability to report on the programs. More importantly though, the initial timer set was too short and so a large chunk of our participants were knocked off because it was still sunday when the timer ran out. To resolve this we had to clone the program and add the drop outs to start on a truncated version of the program. And then we run into the same issues with reporting here as well.
End result is that what should have been 4 programs total has become 12.
I can attest to this being a PITA. We’ve had to push several items in order to resolve issues caused by this.
Any news on this being built into the product so that it would skip weekends and only re-evaluate the condition every 24 hours from the initial send time so we don’t end up with emails being sent outside business hours which is super awkward.
Just brainstorming here but if you take an example of wanting to send an email 75 days before renewal and don’t want to send email over the weekend, I think the following might work…
Sources Filters
Renewal Date <= Add N Days to Rule Date, 77
Renewal Date >= Add N Days to Rule Date, 75
Schedule this to run on Weekdays Only so on a Friday it captures renewal dates 77 days in the future but it also captures the renewal date 76 and 75 days in the future.
This rolling 3 day window will account for not running the Sources data on the weekend.
Rely on the Uniqueness Criteria in the Filter Criteria on Participants to only allow your recipient into the program once even though they will meet the Participant Sources criteria in 3 consecutive days.
Anybody think this would work?
That should work @Todd Dowell, with one possible caveat.
Your program will send more emails at 77 days in the future and fewer at 75 days in the future. If you run this every weekday, your customers who are renewing 77 days in the future will be in scope. Then the next two days (days 76 and 75) they would be excluded based on uniqueness criteria.
On a Monday, you would send 3x worth of emails, because on Mondays you would be sending for days 77, 76 and 75.
If you really want it to land on 75 days prior to renewal most often, then use your plan, but use 75, 74 and 73. Your message will arrive 1 or 2 later than planned, if that 75th day is a weekend day.
If you ever had a profile with us, there's no need to create another one. Don't worry if your email address has since changed, or you can't remember your login, just let us know at community@gainsight.com and we'll help you get started from where you left.
Else, please continue with the registration below.
.
