Reminder Email with variable dates

[Anonymous]

Here is a scenario I'd love some help or suggestions with.  I am trying to set up an email flow that does payment reminders (transactional email) a week, a day, and the day of their due date. For each customer, this date-field can be different and changes every two weeks or when a customer makes a payment early, so it's a little tricky in scheduling.

I want to set up a triggered campaign for this. Every time this field changes, the campaign is triggered to send out an email a certain amount of days before the date in the field.
For example, the date populates as March 14th. The campaign will trigger an email to be sent March 7th.
I know there is an option to use a "Date Token" as a Wait step criteria, but is there a way to schedule an email before a variable date token?
I wish to avoid creating other date fields (like a date for the week before and a date for the day before) if at all possible.

Other scenarios where this may be helpful is, say, sending out a "Happy Birthday" email a week before a customer's birthday with an offer... or if a customer signs up with your services, they receive an offer that expires in x dates and you want to send a reminder the day before to redeem it. 

Has anyone set something up like this before or is it even possible?


Thanks in advance!

Hillary

[Anonymous]

Good news!  There is a feature coming in the March release (3/8) that will allow you to say "Wait Until 14 days before the {{lead.X}} date. In other words, it will let you say plus/minus days!

[Anonymous]

We're working on birthday emails now too and have been going through all the threads that discuss the advanced wait step, date work around for birthday card, etc but, we haven't quite nailed down how to do it in our own Instance...yet!

Some background:

1. We don't use SalesForce so we can't create a special field to write to Marketo for a trigger

2. We can use a datetime option special field however, it seems as though there are similar issues for that field type.

Smart List: Includes any customers w/ a birthday in the past

Flow:

The resulting schedule looks like this (we've used test accounts and entered a number of birthdays):

This is the qualified leads (there should be about 6 more but they haven't shown up any time we create this campaign)

We're eager to hear of any other options that anyone can think of.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the response Cheryl!
Will this be available for all Marketo users or is it exclusive to certain plans?

[Anonymous]

Does anyone know if this functionality launched? 

[Anonymous]

Amber, it absolutely did. I've been using it for a few months now.

[Jason_Scott]

Hillary, How did you set up this type of campagin?  I do not have the option to trigger based on birthday.  Thanks!

[Veronica_Holme4]

Hi Jason,

Have a look at the documentation on Advanced Wait Steps. This article is a great how to on using the birth date in the advanced wait steps and sending an email before or on somebody's birthday.

http://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000L98KCAS 

[Jason_Scott]

Hi Veronica,

Thanks for the reply.  If I use the wait step process will I miss anyone who's added the SFDC/Marketo system after the campaing is activated?