No Scheduler for Publishing Advanced Outreach

+1

We have international clients and would love to be able to schedule exact times when they would receive particular communications from us.

Hi Drew, I definitely hear this a lot in support!

Normally the recommendation we give is to start with no participants loaded when you publish the AO and then set the participant sync to run when you want it to start sending emails.

Understandably, some people are not comfortable with this as you are putting faith in your query being correct and don't have the ability to review the list before it gets triggered(unless you clear the participants) so I do agree that we should add some more user friendly options for timing advanced outreaches overall.

Hi Drew and Alex,

For an one time advanced outreach, you can set the schedule for the sources and publish the advanced outreach. This will ensure that the participants are brought in at the right time into advanced outreach.

@Alex - We have the ability to sync the participants from the sources to actually see who are going to be part of the advanced outreach before publish. You can also clear the participants once they confirm if the query is working fine and then publish the advanced outreach.  Now , the scheduler will run at the configured date and time and the participants are brought in at the right time into advanced outreach.

With this winter release, we have also provided the option of changing schedule post publish of AO.

Thanks
Abhishek S

Cool, thanks for the updates! Good to hear that it will be fixed later this year.

Hi Drew,

This above mentioned capability is already available since last year. The enhancement for ability to edit source schedule post published just got released a couple of days back(winter release).

Thanks
Abhishek S 

I'd like to reiterate a need for this scheduling feature within AOs as it is super painful to have to manually create all of these as outreaches so they can be scheduled.

We're currently in the middle of a massive email send because of GDPR and will be comming close to 200,000 contacts. Because of needing to limit the impact to support, we're sending in waves of 5,000 every two hours. If I could schedule these through AOs, I wouldn't need 40 different outreaches to get this done. 

Additionally someway to segment powerlists by groups of X would be fantastic because we know we're going to have to do more giant email comms in the future.

Because power lists have to be imported when you create your source in AO, it makes the above solution of not importing the contact list until the time of comm impossible.

Hi Brad,

You can use scheduler configuration as part of sources to schedule it at the time and date in which you want the emails to go out. 

For the ability to segment, there is no way out of the box to segment customers but if you were to configure a column and load a number from 1 to 40 consecutively for all the 200,000 contacts, you can use that column as a potential segment criteria for the powerlist.

How this will work- 
First Batch - Configure Powerlist to bring in contacts with value 1 (it will bring in 5000 contacts) and configure schedule to be sent at X PST. At X PST , you will have emails being sent for the first 5000 contacts. 

Second Batch - Change Powerlist configuration(same powerlist) to bring in contacts with value 2 .Also , please refresh powerlist so that the most recent list of contacts with the new criteria are included. Now , modify the schedule in AO to be changed to X+2 PST. 

Similarly , you can modify the powerlist criteria and the AO schedule post publish to ensure that the new wave of participants are added into the AO

Hope this helps!

Thanks
Abhishek S

I'd like to add recurrence to the scheduling capability request. We are doing our first email chain for Onboarding purposes and we would like the emails to send each Monday. We can set a 7-day conditional wait, but I can't figure out how to set the first one to send on a Monday. Alternatively, the first email could send on any weekday then have the following emails send each Monday after that.

Thanks,
Elizabeth

Hi Elizabeth, 

If you are using a Powerlist or Query Builder as your participant source, you can schedule the Advanced Outreach to refresh those sources (bringing in new participants) on a Daily/Weekly/Monthly basis.

See: https://support.gainsight.com/Product_Documentation/CoPilot_and_Automated_Email/Admin_Configuration/...

Hey Dan, does this mean after the first load of contacts, then the future ones can be loaded based on the Powerlist or Query Builder schedule? 

Hey Lane,

The only thing that loads participants is the participant sync. If using a PL, it will check for new participants in the PL(it won't refresh it) based on the schedule in Dans picture. If using a query, it will run the query based on the schedule.

Alex is spot on. For the reason he mentioned, it's preferred to use a bionic query as it's always refreshed in real time at the scheduled time. The powerlist has two time schedules that you need to worry about.

Really, powerlist is to bionic query what outreaches is to Advanced Outreaches.