Schedule a recurring batch campaign every 30 minutes

[RaulEr]

Hi community!

Is there a way to create a batch campaign that runs every 30 minutes?

I have one campaign that runs M-F and another that runs S-S, so I can do actions during business hours vs -non-business hours. But I want to run these campaigns every 30 minutes or at least every hour so it will feel more real-time for the users (when sendingd emails).

- Raul

[Darshil_Shah1]

Well, technically it is not possible to schedule a batch campaign to run at an interval of  30/60 minutes, you'll need to create 48/24 batch SCs each scheduled to run every half-an-hour/hour of the day, if at all you want to pull this off somehow (definitely not a good/recommended approach!) - instead, is there any possibility of sending the emails based on a trigger - trigger email on a certain CDV, activity, etc.?

[RaulEr]

Hi Darshil,

Thanks for your reply. Well, I currently have it as a trigger campaign, but that removes the ability to set one campaign to run on weekdays and another to run on weekends.

- Raul

[Darshil_Shah1]

Why not use a single campaign + email, and personalize the email content using the velocity based on the day of week? Linked here is an article by Sandy that articulates "Switch email content based on day/time" using velocity FYR.

You can also explore the option of computing the day of week using a webhook engine and then filtering people using response data in each of the campaigns.

[Jo_Pitts1]

@RaulEr 

What is the actual use case?  

Depending on that you can do a few different things.

1. If it is based off a form fill, you could use some client side javascript to populate the day of week into a hidden field on the form.  This could then be used to in Marketo to swap email content using Velocity, or you could use it to request/execute entirely different campaigns.
2. If it isn't a form fill (maybe a record coming from CRM for example), you could use a webhook call to Flowboost to get the current Day of Week, and write it back to a field on the record.  Then, trigger subsequent campaigns based on that field being updated and the specific values in it.  This approach would also work for the form fill as well if you prefer it to client side JS.

Cheers

Jo

Do you want to send different email content based on the day of the week or do you want an entirely different flow?? 

[SanfordWhiteman]

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If it isn't a form fill (maybe a record coming from CRM for example), you could use a webhook call to Flowboost to get the current Day of Week, and write it back to a field on the record.  Then, trigger subsequent campaigns based on that field being updated and the specific values in it.  This approach would also work for the form fill as well if you prefer it to client side JS.

yep, this FlowBoost ’hook

currentDay = FBUtil.time().tz("America/Los_Angeles").format("dddd");

will return the full string “Monday”, “Tuesday”, etc. The time zone is an important part because the day depends on the zone!

Though I’d hope this can be done with just Velocity. Like you and Darshil note, depends on whether more than just email content needs to be switched.

[Jo_Pitts1]

@SanfordWhiteman ,

I'd hope it could be done in Velocity as well, but we don't know what else is going on other than the control of content in an email.

[Darshil_Shah1]

Yeah - Velocity will be a preferred approach here if this is just a send an email with different content based on the day of week! 

@RaulEr, please let us know the exact use-case, and if there are any things you do differently in both the flows (weekday v/s. weekend campaigns' flow) other than sending different versions of the email. Thank you!

[RaulEr]

Is there a section here to see how Velocity can help me on this? I have never used it.

- Raul

[Darshil_Shah1]

This is the link  to Sandy's blog which explains how velocity can be used in making email content dynamic based on the day/time (you may first wanna get accustomed a little with the VTL through below resources tho). 

Since you're starting with the velocity, you can find the Getting Started with Velocity Script helpful. You can refer Sandy's VTL tagged posts here: https://blog.teknkl.com/tag/velocity/ , these are really great and helpful. And, here's the link to Marketo's email scripting page which explains basic VTL constructs with a few example scripts.

Besides all of these, there's plethora of content on the community about VTL!