Add Delay Follow

This step makes a record to wait for a particular amount of time before executing the next step.

How to use "Add Delay" Action?

This action is helpful for many cases, but the most common case is to create a drip-based campaign for nurturing leads.

• Let's drag-drop the delay action step on the journey's canvas.

• Click on the step to configure the delay options.
• You can set up delays in seconds, minutes, hours and days.
• You can enable the DAY TIME Window to configure advanced options.
• With this you can choose:
  • Select the days for step execution
  • Select the time for the execution
  • Timezone
  • Delay calculation based on contact's timezone

FAQs

How delays are calculated?

Delay calculations start from the time the record has reached a particular stage.

• 1 day (means 24 hours) -> E.g., If a contact reaches to delay of 1 day at 4 PM, then the next step will be executed at 4 PM on the next day.
• 1 week (means 168 hours) - E.g., If a contact reaches to delay of 1 week at 4 PM Tuesday, then the next step will be executed at 4 PM on the next Tuesday.

What happens if the delay setting is changed?

• Records already reached on this action will follow the old delay. New records to hit this action after the change will follow the updated delay.

What happens if my delay window is 9 AM to 4 PM and contact enters the step at 4.15 PM

• Contact will have to wait for the next available time window for the execution. The system will not auto-adjust the nearby execution window.

Can we select the contact's timezone for the delay calculation?

• You can select the option "Use contact's timezone if it's set." It will ensure that automation is executed based on the contact's timezone and not based on your selected timezone.

Use Cases

Send lead nurture email after every 2 days

• Suppose you want to send a series of emails to nurture new leads. This automation journey sends the first email as soon as the contact is added to the subscriber list and then waits for the next two days before sending the next email. We can repeat the same process and build an email campaign spanned over multiple days.

Avoid sending emails or texts over the weekend

• Let's continue with the previous use case. If the first nurture email fires on Thursday, then the journey will wait for two days and fire the next email on Saturday.
• If we enable the Day Time Window and select days from Monday-Friday for execution, then the journey will wait until the next available window and fire the email on Monday. We can also use time period to make sure the steps only executes when time is also matched. 

Can I avoid the execution of the next step outside office hours

• Suppose you want to send a welcome text to the customer who signs up for your product. But you only want to send those messages between 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM.  
• To achieve this case, we can put a delay step with a delay period of 0 minutes and time execution from 8 AM to 5 PM. If anyone signs up at 6:00 PM, they will get the welcome message the next day at 8:00 AM.