How to use Wait step in Journeys. Using Wait step in Journeys

In this section, you'll learn how to add a wait step in your journey. Wait steps are crucial to ensuring the timed execution of events, helping optimize engagement with contacts at prime moments.

Businesses often require time gaps between sending a series of messages or assessing certain conditions. A 'wait' step in a journey allows you to:

• Schedule a series of brand engagement messages.
• Dispatch content at high engagement times.
• Introduce delays ensuring components like data capture or condition assessments work optimally.

You can drag and drop a Wait step to a journey and configure it.

The configuration options for a wait step are:

• Wait X Minutes
• Wait X Hours
• Wait X Days

If you choose to create a delay of X days, each day will be calculated as a 24-hour period. If you choose to wait X days and delay until a specific time of day, each day will be calculated as a calendar day to avoid prolonged wait periods depending on when a recipient enters your flow.

Example Let's say you want to have a time delay for "Wait 1 Day, until 10 AM" and then send a message:

• Contact A enters your series at 9 AM. Waiting 1 day (24 hours) would land your recipient at 9 AM the next day and the message would send 1 hour later at 10 AM. The total amount of time between when they trigger the flow and when they receive the first message is 25 hours.
• Contact B enters your series at 11 AM. Waiting 1 day (24 hours) would land your recipient at 11 AM the next day. In order to send at your specified time of 10 AM, we'd need to wait another 23 hours. This means Contact B would receive your message almost a full day later than Contact A. What happens instead is that Contact B will receive the message at 10 AM the following day, 23 hours after they triggered the flow.

To avoid the above problem, the wait step includes a specific time of day configuration. This means that, using the above example, Contact A and Contact B will both get the message at the same time.