Annual Renewal Nurture - How to trigger emails based on a Future Date?

[Anonymous]

I am trying to build out some nurturing campaigns targeted at cutomers whose annual license is about to expire. For example, a customers purchases a 1, 2 or 3 year contract. When it hits 90 days from that contract expirtaion date, we want to start sending subscription reminder renewal emails. I know I could adjust the campaign weekly and run it manually but I'd like to set and forget.

Is there a good way to use a timeframe condition for the future? Instead of date is in the last 90 days, would like to say date is in the next 90 days in a nightly campaign that grabs members.

For SF gurus, is it possible to build some kind of Days til Expiration field in SF that calculates the timeframe until renewal? I could then run a trigger campaign when that number hits 90. I would rather do through Marketo though as I've seen where SF doesn't always sync SF only changes over on a regular basis.

Thanks for any insight.

[Anonymous]

Veronica H just answered this question in another post. It looks like that future wait steps can get built using advanced wait tokens. Can't wait to try this out.

http://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000L98KCAS

[Anonymous]

In the end, the advanced wait token didn't work. I just wrote up some specific use cases for the IN THE FUTURE time constraint.

https://community.marketo.com/MarketoIdeaDetail?id=08750000000JeCwAAK

[Conor_Fitzpatri]

Hi Jeff,

Thank you for posting this idea - I am trying to build a similar campaign and am frustrated at the lack of an IN THE FUTURE constraint.

Can you explain your workaround in a little more detail? Specifically, I am trying to build a campaign that sends an email once a quarter based on their start date. We added 4 fields their start date + 90, start date + 180, etc. Where I'm getting hung up is how I can build a list of all the folks that start + 90 = today, start +180 = today, etc.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Conor

[Conor_Fitzpatri]

Jeff,

Just think I figure out a way, would love to know your thoughts about it.

I set a batch campaign where:

• the smart list had the criteria license start + 90 was in the past 1 day
• flow is send email
• scheduled a recurrence to run daily

I set up three other identical campaigns for the other date fields.

Thanks,

Conor

[Anonymous]

Conor, would have answered earlier but I was traveling.

Nice work, I think you have it set up right. Hope it's working for you. 

A couple of assumptions/notes....
1) The 4 fields are setup with SF workflows that populate the fields when the original field is populated or changed. NOT A CALCUALTED FIELD.
For example, if the renewal date is July 1, 2014, the workflow would make the  start date + 90 October 1, 2014.

In most cases, it's not recommended to use SF calculated fields as that value only syncs back to Marketo if there is a change to the record. Marketo doesn't see a daily calculated date field change as a change of data since it's a calculation.

2) The field is at the Lead, Contact or Account level. If it's at an Opportunity level, different complexities get introduced since there can be multiple Opportunities within an account.

3) I use TODAY but the Past 1 day should work just fine. You may also want to set the schedule so the lead qualifies to a limited time frame (like once a week or month). This is just a backup to help prevent double mailings in case some funky thing happens with your data.

Good luck. 

[Conor_Fitzpatri]

Awesome tips, really appreciate the help Jeff!!