Mon-Fri Wait Time Question

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

I'm looking for some clarification on advanced wait steps - specifically, a Mon-Fri duration wait step.

I have a campaign which uses '1 month' as an interval.

As I understand it, that means the email will be sent on the same day of the next month (i.e. if the first email was sent on the 1st Feb, the second one would go on 1st March.

The problem: Using '1 month' intervals means that send days could fall on a weekend, which I do not want.

The solution: Is obviously to use Mon-Fri, so that weekends are avoided.

My question: That's all well and good, but say the wait time elapses on a Saturday. Does that then mean Marketo will wait until 00.01 on a Monday morning to send my email, or will it respect the actual send time of the original email (I have contacts in various time zones, so respecting initial send times is vital for delivery).

For example: If Email 1 was sent at 14:00 on Thursday 1st March, waiting 'One month' would make Email 2 send date as Sunday 1st April at 14:00. With Mon-Fri enabled, would Email 2 then be sent out at 14:00 on the Monday after the wait time has elapsed, or as soon as the clock hits 00.01?

If i'm not being clear, please do tell me!

[Anonymous]

Hi Andrew,

That's right, if you want to send it from Monday to Friday you can do so through the way you described. By the day field, there is a 'Select time' section, where you can specify the time during those days you would like the email to be sent. This time will be set up based on your default instance time zone, in our case you can see it is GMT. You mentioned that you need to send emails based on different time zones, so this won't work very good for you. It's quite a limitation. If you have Workspaces and Partitions you could set different default times. If not I would suggest you calculate a time that might be appropriate for your different time zones and apply it.

Hope this helps you.

[Josh_Hill13]

Yes, this is well documented.

Duration=1 month or X days

Must End - M-F

at 9am

If Month ends on Saturday, then it waits until the next Monday at 9am.

[Ryan_ZAKSZESKI]

Hi Josh Hill, can you help with this example? It wasn't clear to me what would happen if you leave the time option blank.

Wait step

Duration: 2 days

Must End On: Mon-Fri at (leave time option blank)

Scenario: Wait step starts at 2PM EST on a Thursday. Will the wait step complete at 2PM EST or 12AM EST on Monday?

[Ankit_Dua]

Yes, you are correct. You can view the details here if you want: Use a Duration in a Wait Flow Step - Marketo Docs - Product Documentation