The wait event is a unique workflow action designed to halt the progress of a contact at a particular step within your workflow until a desired condition is fulfilled. This powerful feature can be utilized when you need to wait for various triggers such as a tag, an appointment, a specific time or event, or a contact reply.
Navigating Wait Step
To add a wait step, click on the “plus sign” anywhere in your workflow.
Then, scroll down to the bottom of the menu and select “Wait”.
Wait Step Function
The wait step can function in a few different ways, so let’s go through each one, starting with time.
The time option is pretty straightforward as it enables you to hold the contact at the wait step for a specified amount of time.
Once that contact has been waiting at the wait step for that amount of time, the wait step will open up, allowing the contact to pass through to the next event.
The time option also gives you a choice to set an advanced window by enabling the toggle.
When this is toggled on, the contact can only pass through this wait step after the specified time, AND if the time is within a certain day and time window.
In this case, if a contact hits this step at 2 pm on a Saturday, the system will not advance them to the next step until the window opens up at 9 am on Monday.
Day, Month, and/or Year
In addition to the windows, you can add an additional filter for day, month, and/or year.
A good time to use this filter would be when you need to send things at the end of the month.
Condition
The next option for wait steps is condition.
This lets you hold the contact at the wait step until a specified condition is met.
For example, you can hold a contact at the wait step until they acquire a specific tag. And then once they acquire that tag, the wait step will allow them to advance.
The next wait option is appointment time, which is great for building appointment reminder campaigns.
When a contact enters the workflow from a booked appointment trigger, the workflow obviously knows the date and time of the appointment and you can use wait steps to send email and SMS reminders at intervals like 1 hour, 1 day, or 1 week.
You can also set your appointment time wait step AFTER an appointment day or time.
This could be used for advancing contacts into message events that ask a contact for a review.
At the bottom, we have two options for appointment reminder and other campaigns where the wait step you are creating could be in the past.
The move to next step can be used if there are steps, such as Add a Tag, that you don't want the contact to skip.
Skip all outbound communication actions - this option is useful if you only have reminder events, such as emails and SMS's.
Contact Reply
The last wait option is contact reply, which enables you to hold the contact until they reply to one of the previous messages in the workflow.
The reply to dropdown will ask you to select a specific message. When the contact replies to that message, the wait step will let them proceed.
Additionally, you can set a time-out window if you only want to wait a limited time for a reply.
Setting a timeout of one hour will hold the contact until either they reply or one-hour passes, whichever comes first.
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