HOW TO: Create recurring workflows for any period of time

[jenniferlim]

With our workflows tool, it is possible to create annual recurring workflows by creating workflows that are centered on a date property. This is great if you’re looking to send an annual birthday greeting to your user base. However sometimes you’re looking for a bit more flexibility in this - maybe you want to send a monthly reminder to your users to check in on their leads, or a weekly email to your contacts. In this post, I’ll walk through how you can create recurring workflows for any period of time by utilizing two separate workflows and a custom date property.

Essentially what we’re doing here is setting up workflow A and workflow B. Anyone I enroll into workflow A will receive the email in workflow B on a recurring basis that I’ll set using a single delay.

We’ll set up workflow A first.

1. Create a workflow from scratch and set the enrollment trigger to Manual enrollment. Make sure that you have re-enrollment enabled. 

1. Add an action to clear the custom date property that you’ve created. 

1. Set a delay for the number of days, weeks or months that you want to wait before the email in workflow B is sent. Essentially, the duration that you’re looking to create a recurring workflow for. I’ve set mine up for one week. Because the delay is in days, you will need to convert your weeks/months into days. 

1. Add an action to set the custom date property to “Date of Step”. 

1. We’re all set with workflow A, so you can proceed with turning it on.

Now, we’ll set up workflow B.

1. Create a workflow from scratch and set the enrollment trigger to “Custom date property is known”. Make sure that you have re-enrollment enabled. 

1. Set your action to send the email to the contact. 

1. Set an action to manually enroll into Workflow A.

With that, your workflows are complete and you can test the workflows out by reducing the delay in Workflow A to a few minutes. The important thing here is that Workflow B will need to be turned on at the time when you want the email to send out to your users. For example, if you want them to receive the email at 11AM every Wednesday, you will need to ensure that you turn it on then. 

Good luck with this!

Jennifer

*Republishing from @JeremyHong for visibility 

[tannerm123]

Hey Jennifer, I've been doing something very similar and found one nuance here. Depending on how many contacts enroll in workflows in your system, there can sometimes be a small delay in enrollment or a property being set, or the system seems to not work.

For example, we tried having a recurring workflow to see if 'today' is considered 'cooling season', AKA Summer. Therefore we had all of our contacts (tens of thousands) re-enroll every 24 hours, and if it was between ~March and ~September, it would set the property = "Cooling Season". This ended up not working correctly in the long term because the 24 hours on an individual contact would get slightly offset over time due to so many other contacts also enrolling.

[carleebenito]

Hi Jennifer, 

I'm hoping to use this solution for a monthly newsletter that only sends out the upcoming month's content which is why I can't use the typical workflows with delays (unless I always go in and delete the last email).

However, I'm a bit concerned with setting goals and suppression lists with this setup, should I apply the same goals and suppressions on both workflow A and B? 

thanks!

[MikeCormack]

Hi Jennifer,

I was thinking if it was a weekly email could you set the workflow to only execute on the hours of Wednesday between 11 and 12 to not have to turn it on and off? And if it was monthly you could use the same logic with a weekly delay and a counter that resets at the end of a four five week cycle?

Mike

[jenniferlim]

Hey Mike,

Great points that you've brought up. Regarding the question - that is correct, you could also set up the workflow to only execute on the specific hours of a day to ensure that the email will only send between specific hours on day without having to turn it on and off.

As for your second question - curious to know what you mean by "a counter that resets at the end of a four five week cycle".

Jennifer

[MikeCormack]

Hi Jennifer,

Because the Gregorian calendar is a terrible pattern, automating the monthly becomes harder is all I was alluding to. I was thinking of a way round that, so a counter was an attempt in my mind, but that only really works for a periodicity, actually doing a monthly automation.... I can't really see it. Not without heading to API land... unless you copied a date field to a text field so you could do a contains on it (turns out you can't do this bit in HS, so back to APIland), then you could use a counter with an incremented number that matches the month, and another that signifies whether an email has been sent in a given month so on the first whatever of a month the email counter is reset to allow an email and the month counter is incremented, then the email counter is reset and you can send a first tuesday of the month. Theoretically. Also out of the realms of time saving perhaps, lol.

Mike