When using our useful Automation tool, there are multiple trigger types to choose from: contact import, email signup, date-based, field change, and two types of link clicks. A date-based event trigger is based on a date stored in a contact’s record like a birthday, anniversary, appointment date, etc.
Ways you can filter a date-based trigger
- You can filter just based on a date alone by choosing what the date trigger event will be.
- You can also choose whether you want to trigger the workflow every year on the anniversary of this date, or only on this exact date, including the year.
- If you choose every year, this trigger event will fire annually based on the month and day in this field. (Don’t forget that recurring date-based triggers must have a valid past year in the date value.)
- If you choose only on this exact date, this trigger will fire only on the exact date in this field, including year. Contacts will be entered into this workflow every time the date in their contact field matches the trigger criteria.
When does a date-based trigger workflow fire?
Date-based automated workflows will fire at midnight PST on the day that is set in the workflow.
While the sending begins at midnight PST, Emma begins putting together the audience for sending at 5 pm PST the day prior, so you’ll want to make sure that contacts are in your account by this time in order to trigger for the next day. The automation fires at midnight, but delivery time might vary slightly depending on your recipients’ e-mail client configuration.
Another useful aspect of date-based triggers is that you can choose to add a rule to the trigger that specifies the campaign to be sent before, after, or right on the date in the field. Doing so creates a delay for contacts that may come into the account the same day that the date field should trigger them.
For example: If a contact was added into your account on the 26th of June, and the date field stated it as 6/26/20, the contact would normally have missed the date-based workflow for June 26th, because it would have had to have been in the account the day before by 5 pm PST in order to make it into that day’s workflow. However, if you delay the actual trigger to send two days after the date listed in the date field, then the workflow would not look at the date field until 6/28/20, due to the two-day delay, in which case the contact would actually still receive the intended workflow.