Eloqua's wait steps are a powerful tool for controlling the flow of your marketing campaigns. By strategically pausing campaigns, you can ensure recipients have time to engage with your message before hitting them with the next step, but also manage time-sensitive content. Learn how to leverage wait steps effectively and avoid common pitfalls to keep your campaigns flowing smoothly.
The Power of the Pause: Why Wait Steps Matter in Eloqua
At firstglance, using wait steps in Eloqua couldn’t be simpler – you set them up tomake contacts wait before they can move on with their journey. However, it'seasy to get confused as to when to set the step to wait for a certainamount of time, and when it should be configured to wait until aparticular date and time.
This small difference is more crucial than it appears, as you might use either one depending on your goals. Campaigns (or parts of them) with a specific timeframe will require the use of a wait step counting down until a specific date. In short, the difference is:
Wait until specific date and time: contacts will wait until the date and time specified in the settings and will continue their journey as soon as that date and time comes. If the contact reaches the wait step after the specified date, they will progress to the next step immediately.
Wait for a defined amount of time (hours/days/weeks/months): The countdown starts as soon as a contact reaches the step, regardless of when the contact enters the campaign.
How Wait Steps Can Backfire (and How to Fix It)
To put the above into a practical use case, here is a real-life example:
Our client was preparing for a sale and sought to advertise a special deal to their current customers, offering an additional 10% discount from January 2nd to January 16th using a promo code distributed via email. The client requested to start by sending an email to inform about the upcoming sale, and then to follow up with a separate email containing a promo code for use during the sale.
The initial planned setup of the flow in Eloqua was as follows:
We aimed to send out the first email informing about the sale and offer when the contact signed up for our campaign, and the second email, containing the promo code, on2nd January. However, after 2nd Jan, the client noticed that contacts were getting both emails on the same day.
The reason was that the wait step in between the two emails had been set up to wait until a specific date – 2nd Jan. The campaign was still active after this date, so all contacts who joined after 2 January received the first email, and as the date in the wait step had passed, they received email 2 immediately.
We suggested a slightly more complex workflow instead, which is pictured below.
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