Does anyone have a work around for a wait until the x of the month in a wait step?

[Michelle_Tizian]

I am setting up a drip campaign and the wait step is specificially for the 20th day of a month.  But I'm not seeing that as an option and I saw that someone submitted this as an idea: Wait until the x of the month

Does anyone have a work around for this? 

[Anonymous]

When is the email before the 20th day of the month email going out? Could you set one wait step to the 20th of a specific month and every wait step thereafter for 1 month?

[Anonymous]

Rick, that sounds like a good workaround, but if you wait 1 month after a specific date, does that wait until the same date one month from now or does it wait 30 or 31 days?  How does it handle a situation where it is the 31st of the month and you tell it to wait 1 month and the next month has 30 days or 28/29 days?

[Anonymous]

Hm, now that is an excellent question, Elliott! One that I have just publicly asked - https://community.marketo.com/MarketoDiscussionDetail?id=90650000000PbKRAA0

[Anonymous]

It's not perfect but I use tokens and date tokens in my programs. I put all send dates (e.g. 20-01, 20-02, 20-03) as date tokens in my program setup. In the flow I choose date token for the wait steps. This enables the flow to mail every 20th of the month. Make sure to add an additional wait step of 10 hours to make sure it doesn't send at 0:00.

[Anonymous]

I did some digging around and it looks like 1 month is exactly 1 month.

Example:

• campaign triggered on Jan 13
• 1 month wait step
• rest of flow on Feb 13

January is a 31 day month

• campaign triggered on Sep 14
• 1 month wait step
• rest of flow on Oct 14

September is a 30 day month

So a one month wait step will last till the exact day of the month, and they both resumed after the wait step within an hour of the time that the step began. I know that doesn't exactly solve the concept of "wait till X of month" but still you can trust a 1 month wait step beginning on the 20th to resume on the 20th.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Rick.  I'm still curious to know how it handles a situation where it is the 31st of the month and you tell it to wait 1 month and the next month has 30 days or 28/29 days.

[Michelle_Tizian]

Thanks guys!  But what if my campaign flow looks like this:
After someone completes a conversion from one campaign, they are then added to campaign #2 which has the following set up.  I have to be able to add new leads to the campaign below at anytime of the month.

email 1 - welcome letter

email 2 - website login instructions 1 hour later, same day.
The reason for the 20th day of the month is because new trial subscribers usually get an email from the editor for the current issue of a publication. 

email 3 - 1st publication access follow up trial #1- on 20th day of month

email 4 - 2nd publication access follow up trial #2 - on 20th day of month

email 5 - trial has ended - continue subscrption now,  login access terminated - 1 week after email 4

email 6 - last chance to continue subscription, reactivate login access - 1 week after email 5. 

remove from campaign add to trial effort #3.
Trial Effort #3 will recycle them. 

So does Rick's suggestion mean that I have to assign a month to start a drip campaign so the subsequent wait steps of the 20th will follow?  What if it's the 16tth of the month and someone needs to be added to the campaign?  or what if someone is added on the 25th of the month?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Michelle, as your leads are added to the new campaign, you can add them to a Static List and then have a recurring smart campaign that runs as a batch on the 20th of each month on the leads in the Static List.  After it runs, it would remove the Leads from the Static List and the process would start all over again.

[Michelle_Tizian]

Thank you everyone and a big special thank you to you Elliott.  That will be my work around.  I was on the right track when I created the static list, but I got stuck with the wait step on the 20th.  So I'm going with your suggestion and test it out. You made my day!