Best Practices for Sending Emails Based on a Future Date

[ashah123]

Hi Team,

I’m working on setting up a nurturing campaign in Marketo based on a date field called Customer Expiration Date. This field is calculated in our data warehouse, synced to CRM, and then passed into Marketo. It helps us identify when a customer is still within their retention period. Once they pass this date, they move into the prospect bucket.

To avoid losing these customers, we want to begin sending renewal-focused nurture emails before they move to the prospect stage.

I wanted to check with you on the best practice for building this in Marketo. Here are the two approaches I evaluated:

1. “Expiration Date in future X days”

I initially tested this filter, but it pulls all records whose expiration date falls between today and X days from now.
Since we only want customers whose expiration date exactly equals X days from today, this approach doesn’t give us the precision we need.

2. “Expiration Date in future 180 days” AND “Expiration Date in future after 179 days” 

This combination returns only the records whose expiration date is exactly 180 days away (in this case, 6 months before expiry), which aligns with our use case of starting the renewal conversation early. This approach produced the correct results in testing.

Before I finalize the setup, I wanted to confirm whether Option 2 is the recommended best practice, or if there’s another method I might be overlooking. 

I also think we might need a daily batch campaign to run to fetch the data as this wouldn't be possible via triggers ..is that correct ?

Any guidance or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Akshat

[cookiemonstersa · Accepted solution]

My 2 cents: 

Your Option 2 is the correct. You also need a daily batch campaign because Marketo cannot trigger off future date math.

Marketo triggers fire only when the field value changes, not when the calendar date passes a threshold.
Because you need to evaluate records every day against today + X days, this must be done with a batch.

[ashah123]

Thanks @cookiemonstersa That helps !!