Do Sequence Emails Go Out On Weekends?

June 06, 2022 22:48

Don't want your campaign emails to go out on weekends? No problem!

You can configure your sequence campaigns to ignore weekends if you like. It's all in how you configure your wait steps.

Two wait actions, back to back

Let's assume we want to wait 3 days before we send an email from our campaign. However we want to make sure the email does not send at the end of the 3 days if it happens to fall on a weekend.

We are going to use two waits connected to each other.

Here's how we would configure this:

1. Configure one wait step to wait for 2 days, as shown below. We will explain this 2 day wait at the end:

2. Add A second wait after the first, but configure it for only weekdays as shown below. Notice there is a specific time of day to send. In this case we chose 9am:

3. Continue building your campaign, in this case we are sending a second email after the 3 days but this could be a text message or something else:

So, the question you might be asking after this is "Why did you only use 2 days in the first wait?"

We used 2 days in this case because that first wait is a hard 48 hours, no exceptions. So we make sure we get those first 2 days set.
The second wait is a maximum 24 hour wait during the week. Longer if over a weekend.
What this means is if a contact enters the first wait on Monday at 1pm, they will leave the first wait on Wednesday at 1pm - exactly 2 days later.
After Wednesday at 1pm they will enter the second wait. That wait is for the next 9am slot on a weekday, which is 9am on Thursday in this example. So we effectively have our three day wait.

How would this behave on a weekend?

Any contact entering the second wait after Friday at 9am will not get the second email until Monday at 9am.

Key Points:

You need to use two wait actions, back to back.
The first wait below does not care about weekends, evenings, mornings, lunch breaks, etc. It will wait exactly the number of hours, days, or weeks that you set. The clock starts ticking down the moment the contact arrives at this step. When the time passes, the contact moves on:
The second wait configuration requires you to specify a time and day. So by configuring a wait as shown below, we are telling the automation to wait until 9am on any Monday through Friday. Do not send unless it's 9am on one of those days: