For trials, anniversaries, renewals, upgrades and more, an IN THE FUTURE time constraint and other time constraints are required. Marketo is already looking at dates with the other constraints—it should be able to tweak an existing constraint to look into the future.
Yes, the advanced wait token can be used as a workaround but it doesn’t work in many cases.
Here are two examples of programs that I’ve worked on in the past two months where the advanced wait didn't work.
Renewal Reminders
Three months before a renewal is due, we wanted to kick off a renewal stream of emails. We’d like to run a daily AUTOMATED campaign that looks out 90 days and pulls in any renewal opps. A constraint like below would work great.
Example of desired functionality
Example of desired functionality
Why advanced wait token doesn’t work: Since there is no Opportunity level wait token, there is no way to grab the Opportunity date.
Workaround: We have someone that manually kicks off the campaign monthly by changing the exact dates in the opportunity constrains to 90-120 days months ahead of today. This is not automated and not exact.
Batch Lists and Uploaded Lists for Birthdates, Upgrade Timeframes, etc.
Yes, the below is a confusing concept but it would be solved by just adding a IN FUTURE X days time constraint. That would allow us to pinpoint the list BEFORE the leads enter the flow.
Yes, the below is a confusing concept but it would be solved by just adding a IN FUTURE X days time constraint. That would allow us to pinpoint the list BEFORE the leads enter the flow.
Let’s say you have a batch of names with varying birthdates you want to add to a nurture campaign that kicks off 30 days ahead of a birthdate. Or, in our case, it was 30 days ahead of a scheduled maintenance upgrade. (Note that different customers have different upgrade conversion dates).
When a customer’s date gets populated to this year, we had a daily batch campaign that added it to the 28 day nurture campaign of 4 emails. It should sit and wait until the advanced wait token is 28 days prior to the upgrade date. So if the the upgrade is 60 days out, it would wait until 32 days and start sending emails. Sounds like it should work, right?
Why advanced wait token doesn’t work: We are letting people into the nurture flow that we don't want in there. If the date fell within 28 days, the daily campaign still added it. That’s fine but the advanced wait token immediately lets the lead pass through rather than act as a gate. For example, if someone’s upgrade date is 14 days from today, they’d bypass that wait token and get the 28 day email string. It would be possible for a lead to get an "Your upgrade is scheduled for next week" after the upgrade actually happened.
Workaround: I’m sure there are a bunch. We created an UPGRADE DATE MINUS 28 field in SF and have a SF workflow that populates that date whenever the UPGRADE DATE field populates. We now run a daily campaign that looks for UPGRADE DATE MINUS 28 is TODAY that adds leads to the 28 day nurture flow. This workaround actually works pretty well but really shouldn't be needed.
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