Timing and Delays with Drift Email Bots

Expected Behavior

• We do not send emails on weekends or holidays
• The time delay you configure is the delay between individual emails)
  For example, if your email is Email 1, 2 day delay, Email 2, 3 day delay, Email 3 - Email 3 will send 3 days after email 2, not 3 days after email 1
• We use smart sending to select time of day to send during business hours (see below for those times)

Although we do not send emails on weekends, we do count weekends in the delay.

Example Scenario

When an email is being sent and its the first in sequence and if the day we’re trying to send is a holiday or weekend, then we’ll send the next available business day.

When we send the first email, the second email gets scheduled / queued.  If the first email gets sent Monday, it immediately gets scheduled with a 2 day delay for Wednesday.  When scheduling, we check if the next send day is a holiday or weekend and in this scenario since Wednesday is not, we send then.

• If someone is in the delay between email 1 and 2 and you change the copy for email 2, the people enrolled in the sequence already will NOT get the new copy.  If someone has yet to enter the sequence (get the first email) they will receive the new copy.
  
• If you update the delay of an email that has already been scheduled, it won’t work.  If new people enter the email sequence and have not received any emails, the new delay will take effect.
• If you edit the copy of email 4 and no one has gone that far (no one is between email 3 and 4) then the changes would take effect.
• If you delete email 4 and they’re between 1 and 2, they won’t get email 4.  If you delete email 4 and someone is between email 3 and 4, there will be no notification but nothing will happen when.
• If you delete email 2 and there is an email 3 and 4, no one will get email 3 or 4 since email 3 only gets scheduled when email 2 is successfully sent.

List of the Holidays We Exclude

We have a static list of holidays in Drift - 

• January 1st                              New Years
• Third Monday in January        Martin Luther King
• Third Monday in  February     Washington’s Birthday
• Last Monday in May                Memorial
• July 4th                                    Independence
• First Monday in September     Labor Day
• October 12                               Columbus Day
• November 11                            Veterans Day
• Fourth Thursday in November  Thanksgiving Day
• December 25                            Christmas Day

List of Time Frames We Use

For smart sending, the time will be randomly chosen from one of 4 buckets:

• 05:30 AM - 06:30 AM
• 09:30 AM - 10:30 AM
• 01:30 PM - 02:30 PM
• 08:00 PM - 11:00 PM