The recipe for successful marketing is simple. You need to deliver the right message to the right person at the most appropriate time. If you wait for too long, a previously engaged customer may no longer find your message interesting, while sending a message too soon might scare a potential customer away. Your task here is to determine the timing that works best for the majority of your contacts.
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For Preset automations, we suggest using delays that are based on our best practices. But you may also test different delays with the A/B testing feature or simply monitor and adjust your automations settings.

All of the automations have a linear structure, where the contact enters the next stage in the Automation only after exiting the preceding one. If you didn't add any delays, the contact would enter the next step (receive the message) immediately. If you add two messages without any delays, they will still be sent and received in the right order, but instantly.
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To add a delay block to the Automation, all you need is to drag and drop the block to one of your workflow nodes.

The Delay can be added to any node in the Automation, except for the last one. As in that case, the Delay is unnecessary.

The Delay can be set to:

Note! Minutes, Immediate, and Specific time of the day options aren't available for workflows based on Viewed product and Viewed page triggers.

Every Delay works as an individual block in your Automation sequence. Therefore, the delay counter starts from the previous block in the Automation sequence, and not from the Automation trigger. If you stack two messages together, both Delays will work individually.

For example, you might use two delay blocks, one specifying the wait time and the second one set to a specific time of the day. In that case, both conditions should be fulfilled before the customer passes to the next step in the automation sequence.

💡 While it might be fine to receive an Email message late at night, if you add an SMS message block to the sequence, you should make sure the message is sent during the daytime.

Also, if you don't want to send your messages on the weekends, you can enable the 'Send on the selected day(s) of the week' option and select all the days except Saturday and Sunday. So, if the contact will reach the delay block on Saturday, for example, the workflow will wait till Monday and will start counting the delay from the moment the contact has hit this delay block. For example, if the customer has reached the delay block with the rules as shown on the screenshot below on Saturday at 6 pm, then he'll get the email on Monday at 9 pm:

Both the Conditional Split and the Audience filter check your Audience against a specific rule but in the time domain. In other words, your contact should qualify with the condition to trigger the workflow or go to the YES path at the point of time when this condition is checked. Due to this, you may want to replace the Audience filter or even the Trigger filter with the Conditional Split when the condition is satisfied with the delay.

If you add the Delay before the Conditional Split block, you'll give more time for your customer to fulfill the requirement. It may become critical if your Automation is based on Message behavior (opens or clicks). If you add the condition right after the message, your contacts simply won't have time to open the message and will go to the No path.

It is also better to add the Action block (send a message or add a tag) right after the Conditional Split. If your condition is based on the purchase behavior or profile data, the result may change at any time, before and after the condition is checked. Therefore, it's better to act right away while the contact qualification hasn't changed.

If you have any other questions, reach out to our Support Team at [email protected] or via an in-app chat.