Rotating Email by Date in an Automation

[Sparkco]

Hello,

As part of my company's welcome series email automation, we highlight weekly promotions. We rotate 5 different promotions week-to-week. Each promotion is a week long. 

I'm trying to set up an automation that will allow me to send emails on a schedule. Each week, a different email highlighting that week's promotion would be sent. After five weeks, the schedule would restart.

Does anyone have experience with this?

[Axel-Mayze]

Hi there.

Do you work with automation?

[Sparkco]

Thanks for the feedback. I will try this and report back. 

[Sparkco]

Not exactly. The recipient will only receive one offer email, and the offer will be different depending on when they are enrolled in the workflow. There will be four offers (A, B, C, and D). In week one, when someone is enrolled, they receive offer A. In week 2, someone enrolling receives offer B, and so on for the four different offers. At the end of the four-week cycle, it would repeat. 

[OliverFedtke · Accepted solution]

Ah ok, thanks for the clarification.

You could maybe help yourself with a trick.

Create a new Property called "First day of the year" or something like this as a Date Property.

On all registration forms, add this new property as a hidden field and set the default value to January 1st of the given year.

This field then will store a reference value like "2024-01-01"

Add a calculated property also, that calculates the calendar weeks with the following formula:

round_up(time_between([properties.createdate], [properties.first_day_of_the_year])/86400000/7,0)+1

This will calculate the calendar week by getting the difference between your set hidden field of first day of the year and the create date of the contact.

You can then easily create lists by checking for calendar weeks. So in one list, you stick all from week 1, 5 81+4), 9 (1+4+4) and so on, in the second list you stick all from week 2, 6 (2+4), 10 (2 +4 +4), and so on.

You will then have separate starting lists based on the calendar week of a given year and can automate.

Only caveat: you have to update the default value hidden fields in each form to the new year on new years eve.

[karstenkoehler]

@OliverFedtke what about contacts that convert on another date than their create date?

[OliverFedtke]

Simply adjust the formula to any given date you want to work with. The only thing here is the reference point.

And of course, ask yourself is the exact week really important or is this just a way to segment all inbound contacts into 4 different groups? This would make it even easier.

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @Sparkco,

Do you have Operations Hub Professional or Enterprise? This could be achieved comparably easily with a custom code action and a branch.

Best regards

[OliverFedtke]

Do you want an infinite loop, going on forever until someone unsubscribes?

While this would be technically possible, I question the reasonableness of this project.

Why should someone react to your offer from week 1 to week 6 if he didn't before? The reason can only be circumstance, for the recipient not reading your mail. But the higher chance is, he didn't like the offer in the first place.

The most important reason someone did not react to offer in the first place is a mismatch in the customer journey stage. 90% of your contacts are not "in market" at any given time.

A smarter way number 1 could be a workflow reacting to clicks and open activities (while open activities are not a safe KPI anymore due to technical reasons).  Resending a newsletter to inactive recipients after a period of time can sometimes be best practice and can easily be done. But avoid bothering your reacting e-mail recipients with redundant and irrelevant content.

The smarter way number 2 could be instead of sending the same offer over and over again, to work with lifecycle stages, use measured activity on your contacts to retarget them with appropriate ads, and trigger another e-mail offer when they show signs of being "in market".

If you still plan to resend exactly the same e-mails in an infinite loop, you check out re-enrollment settings on a workflow.