How to Create a Countdown Calculated Field? Like Days til Expiration

[Anonymous]

Is there a way to create a field that calculates days til birthday, expiration, etc in Marketo. I'd like to use this field as a trigger to send upgrade nurture communications and trigger other events.

Open to workarounds

- Have tried building a calculated field in SF. That doesn't work because the field doesn't sync to SF unless there is an actual change to the date (as opposed to a calculation).

- Have tried using the Wait Token in the flow but I keep getting errors.

- Would love to see "Date is in NEXT 90 DAYS" as a Smartlist constraint but that isn't available.

[Anonymous]

Hey Jeff, 

You need to used the advanced wait step "Date Token" . In the example below I could change it to Trial End Date and Minus 90 days and it would wait before you trigger the email. 




Hope this helps! 

- Jeff

[Anonymous]

Hi Jeff,
What the other Jeff said is correct. Please note that lead and company date tokens in wait steps are only supported for trigger campaigns, not batch campaigns.

Will

[Anonymous]

Thanks. I was using the wait token in a batch campaign. Im now testing it with a Request Campaign trigger so hopefully that will do the trick.

[Anonymous]

So the wait token worked like a charm....kind of.

The use case:
We are sending a string of communications to support a major upgrade where clients will get converted over several months.

The trigger is  upgrade conversion date. When that get's populated, there is a nightly campaign that requests the nurture campaign of emails that start at 28 days.  

The Issue:
If someone's date gets populated within 28 days, they'd get added to the campaign. That's fine, however, they bypass the wait step token duration and go to the next flow step. I'd rather the wait step function like a gate.

Example:
Wait Token Set for 28 days before a upgrade date. If someone gets added to the campaign at 20 days, it would by pass that wait step and go right to the flow. Since I can't set a date in the NEXT X days in a constraint, I can't do this in the trigger either.

Any suggestions?

WorkAROUND?
I was thinking of creating a  SF Field that is populated when the Upgrade Date gets populated so it's 30 days prior. I can then use that date as my trigger. (If Upgrade Minus 30 Date Field is TODAY, then add to campaign)

Would something like this work? (BTW, I'm not a SF coder)

Workflow Rule:
AND(
ISCHANGED( UpgradeDate__c ),
ISPICKVAL(Length, "30 Day"))

The workflow action would be a field update to the UpgradeMinus30_c:
Field Update Rule:
Today() - 30

[Anonymous]

I think the actual code is a little different than above but we have used the  Upgrade Minus 30 Date and it's working as the workaround.

I just wrote up some specific use cases for the IN THE FUTURE time constraint which would have solved the issue from a Marketo persective. Hopefuly Marketo adds this in the a future release.

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