Use a wait step in a journey
In this section, you'll learn how to add a wait step in your journey. Wait steps are crucial to ensuring the timed execution of events, helping optimize engagement with contacts at prime moments.
Businesses often require time gaps between sending a series of messages or assessing certain conditions. A 'wait' step in a journey allows you to:
Schedule a series of brand engagement messages.
Dispatch content at high engagement times.
Introduce delays ensuring components like data capture or condition assessments work optimally.
Good to know
The configuration options for a wait step are:
Wait X Minutes
Wait X Hours
Wait X Days
Wait X Days and delay until a specific time of day
If you choose to create a delay of X days, each day will be calculated as a 24-hour period. If you choose to wait X days and delay until a specific time of day, each day will be calculated as a calendar day to avoid prolonged wait periods depending on when a recipient enters your flow.
Example
Let's say you want to have a time delay for "Wait 1 Day, until 10 AM" and then send a message:
Contact A enters your series at 9 AM. Waiting 1 day (24 hours) would land your recipient at 9 AM the next day and the message would send 1 hour later at 10 AM. The total amount of time between when they trigger the flow and when they receive the first message is 25 hours.
Contact B enters your series at 11 AM. Waiting 1 day (24 hours) would land your recipient at 11 AM the next day. In order to send at your specified time of 10 AM, we'd need to wait another 23 hours. This means Contact B would receive your message almost a full day later than Contact A. What happens instead is that Contact B will receive the message at 10 AM the following day, 23 hours after they triggered the flow.
To avoid the above problem, the wait step includes a specific time of day configuration. This means that, using the above example, Contact A and Contact B will both get the message at the same time.
Delay until a specific time of day
You may want to control what time of day contacts receive a specific journey email, SMS, or WhatsApp message.
in your series. This can be useful when you want to standardize the time of day people receive your messages, for example, if you know that your audience typically opens emails at a certain time.
Within the settings for a time delay component, you can choose Delay until a specific time of day. If you have an SMS following this time delay, this will establish the send time for that SMS.
After choosing a time of day, you can then select a timezone. You can choose a specific timezone in order to ensure each contact receives your message at your preferred time of your choice. One benefit to choosing the "Wait X Days" option, without selecting a set time, is that each contact will then receive the email, SMS, or WhatsApp message at the same time they entered the journey - which is likely when they'll be most active, as that's the same time they performed the action that added them to the journey.
What you'll need
A journey with two or more steps
Step one: Add the wait step
Assuming you already have a journey or are building a journey that has a trigger set up, you now can add a ‘Add the wait’ step.
Hover your mouse pointer over the nodes of the journey tree or in between two steps and you’ll see an add a step icon.
Select the add a step icon.
Select the Wait step..
Step two: Configure the wait step
By default, the wait step is set to a time delay of 5 minutes. For marketing purposes, we recommend increasing this time.
If you want to wait until a certain amount of time has passed, configure the time delay you want to use, by choosing minutes, hours, or weeks.
If you want to wait until a specific date and time, click the toggle and configure the time delay until a specific time of day, then add the time and the timezone the step should wait for.
Click Save. The tree will be updated.
Sucess! You've added a wait step.
FAQs
I am unable to find the timezone I want to use
Please reach out to support.
Do timezones account for daylight saving
Yes, we automatically account for daylight savings. If you do not see this reflected, try publishing the journey again. If the issue persists, please contact support.
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