ActiveCampaign Wait Until Conditions How To Configure

Active Campaign Wait Until.

In this video, I’m going to cover the powerful but sometimes confusing, wait until capability Active Campaign provides in their automations. Now there’s two scenarios, one is wait for a specified period of time, or wait until specific conditions are met. We’re going to focus on the second one and that’s the one in my opinion that’s more powerful and to do so, I’m going to show you some examples, and then give you pros and cons and gotchas to watch out for.

So let’s dive right in.

Inside your Active Campaign account, you want to be obviously in an automation, how somebody gets into there, I don’t care. What we’re going to do in here is putting some weight conditions. So let’s start with what I consider the easy one, which is wait until certain time of day so if you were to go in here and put a wait condition, two options wait for a specified period of time or until specific.

We’re going to focus on this one for this example and again, in my opinion, this is the easy one. So it says wait for and then here we can do minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years. Now, the minimum amount of minutes that I understand is five minutes and even that isn’t perfect. So in other words, if you get in here, five minutes later, they may or may not have moved on to the next step.

My guess is Active Campaign will fire off an event to get them to move on the five minute mark. Total speculation on my part, but I think that’s what happened. So for instance, if somebody joins at, let’s say, four minutes after the hour, they’re not going to get pushed through it nine minutes after the hour, they might get pushed through it 10 minutes after the hour, so they actually wait six minutes. So just keep that in mind.

You know, if you get down to this smaller time frame, the resolution isn’t as good or nearly as Perfect. And then, you know something else to point out? Well, no, that’s it. I’m just going to say that there’s I’ll show you in a different one. And let’s do wait and tell. Now this is basically going into the other scenario and I’m not going to go into it from here. But basically, that’s the one the more complicated, if you will, to you.

So let me just go back here, let’s I actually defaulted one day. That’s it. That’s pretty darn simple. Those are the kind of things you can do ahere’s nothing beyond a simple wait for one day. So here’s one where let’s say we only want to do something on a weekday and that’s where the other option comes in. So I’m going to get rid of this guy. I’m going to go back to here, put a wait until specific conditions are met.

And let me see if I can find this. Where are you? I’m gonna start with this one. Yeah, where is it? All right here it current day of the week is week, day or weekend, they make it easy. So this is this meets my rule, if you will. So you can just simply say it’s a weekday. And then if they join on Saturday, they wait until it is Sunday or sorry Monday before if that’s how you’ve set up your weeks before they move on to the next step.

Now, here’s something I want to point out. I think it’s kind of important in my opinion. Notice it says current day of the week America Boise, that’s where I live. That’s how I’ve set up my account. However, we can also use the contacts time zone, and that might be more appropriate. I tend not to do that and the reason is, I don’t believe it’s always correct.

So for instance, what I’ve noticed is sometimes send out emails like a you know, campaign email, and then you’ll notice people read your emails and Immediately, which I have a hard time believing all these people do. My observation is Gmail tends to open up emails and samples, if you will, they’re just checking for whatever reason. And then Active Campaign picks up on that information that they Oh, they’re in Mountain View California.

That’s not necessarily the case. But that’s might be where Google or Gmail is, so they can change their timezone based on that. So I would just be careful about that. Same with location, I’m sorry, location is what I should say. So my preference is to always use wherever my time zone is. And I’ve got it set up to be in Boise, Idaho. So that’s just one thing. So there’s there’s weekday.

Now, we could have done this a more difficult way. And just for fun, let’s do this. If it’s Sunday, no, if it is Monday, or if it’s Tuesday, or Wednesday or Thursday or Friday, so you would do something like this current day of the Week. And that’s in the context time zone. And there we go is Tuesday is sorry, is Monday, Tuesday, etc, etc. So I’d have five or conditions.

Notice it’s an or not an end. And I’m also not using the segment here. Now, if it’s just simply weekday versus weekend, I would fall back to what Active Campaign provides. But if it’s something like, Oh, I only want it to go out on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, then I would use something like this. And then you would click on Save.

Watch! There’s one other thing I think that comes up, maybe. Now here’s kind of an important one to take into account. No time limit! Now we know Monday and Tuesday is going to occur every week. So we don’t have to worry about this. So you could say no time limit. Alternatively, you can say up to seven days just to be sure. But if Monday or Tuesday never occurs again. Well, I don’t think you have worry about anything at that point.

So in this case, I’m not going to worry about a time limit, there are scenarios where you might want to do them. So in this case, I’ve set it up so that it’s actually Monday, Tuesday, then I would send an email so that way you can reference. For instance, how is your, your week? Don’t I know it’s the start of the week? How’s your week going? So you can personalize it a little bit more based on what you’ve done before you send this email.

Okay, here’s what I’m going to show you, which I think is probably one of the most powerful things is how do I pause an automation while a person is in another automation, okay, that’s a good one. So the scenario would be they come into here, send them emails, and then you put them into another automation. I’m just pulling something up. I’m just going to pull that one up.

So they’re in that automation and you don’t want them to continue and tell they finished that automation. So what I would do is I put in a wait until specific conditions are met. And then I want to go in here and I think its actions has not, yeah has ended in automation.

So do that, then I would go find that automation. Now, this is a scenario where you don’t necessarily want to wait for them indefinitely Dave, you may or may not. Maybe you put a one week limit on that. So I’m gonna say up to seven days or one week, and click on save.

So what that means is, if they haven’t finished that other automation in seven days, or sorry, one week, they will continue on so they can sit for up to seven days here while they’re in there. But if they finished this automation, let’s say in four days? Well, they’re going to keep going on because after four days because they’ve met this criteria. Now, the thing you want to do after that is probably check, are they still in this automation?

So I’m going to put it if statement in there. And we are going to go back to actions. So we can do that or not currently in automation or not currently, so one of those three things work, but whichever one you choose will depend on will dictate what you do next, I’m gonna say Are they in the Automation?

So now what we know is if seven days have gone by, and they’re still in this automation, then we’re going to go down this yes path, or we’re going to go down the no path if they finished it. So you might have over here say, hey, Dave, I saw that you Still on this automation, what’s your problem?

Or, hey, Dave, on the no path. Thank you for completing that automation, something like that This way you know something about that person. So that’s a scenario where you might want to wait for a certain amount of time and then check. Are they in the other automation or not?

Now, here’s another scenario. I’m going to start just leading stuff left and right. Let’s say you’ve sent out an email. And I do not know if I have an email. Okay, yeah, let’s just use that. Now, you want to know if they’ve opened this email or click the link let’s just go with open and I’ll be honest, opens I don’t think are great clicks I think are better. Because we can count on clicks. We can’t necessarily count on opens.

That Gmail example I gave you earlier where they you know, Gmail likes to sample emails that might screw up this here so what you can do here is put another wait or wait and tell and again it’s specific conditions and I would say something like can I think it’s gonna be action has opened has not opened so I’m going to do has not opened not any email it’s going to be this one this guy right here eBook plus tripwire template.

And again, in my opinion, it’s important to have a timeline on this one. So I’m just going to say up to a day. So up to one day. So we wait for up today and then guess what we’re going to check. Did they or did they not? Hoping that email you know, so has not open so let’s do has not open.

So this is one of those scenarios again where I might simply resend this email as is, or maybe have a different version that I send out. And then here maybe I send a different email or go down a different path. But in this case, I’m waiting until they’ve done something for a certain amount of time before I move them along.

In general, you know, I want them to open the email, I want them to click, I want them to do something, then I can check after I’ve waited for an appropriate amount of time. Okay, so here’s another one and You might think well, yeah, I can just send their login details.

Sure that works. But let me show you why that’s a little bit challenging sometimes I’m going to get rid of what we’ve got here. And I’m going to get rid of that. Now, let’s just, you know, let’s just assume this is my login details for somebody to get into my membership site.

I could just send it right away. But let’s see what happens if they don’t already have a password setup. And I’ve got something going on a membership site that automatically generates a password and then sends it back to Active Campaign.

So I might have a custom field called password. And if it’s empty, I don’t want to send an email but if it’s populated, I do want to send an email. So here’s one way to handle that is first thing that you they come in here, we do a check Yes! Well let’s it’s getting Sorry, it’s one of our wait and tells for not sorry, not that specific conditions are met.

And this is going to be a custom field and hopefully there it is password is blank or not blank. So is it not blank, and I used to use is greater than, and then I would leave this empty but Active Campaigns have the same so this is kind of a nice is not blank.

So, in other words, there’s something in there. So, if I do that, and my opinion time limits, very important here. So I’m just going to say up to five minutes. So we just want to make sure there’s a password present before we send this email. Now again, I’m going to put an F statement here to make sure it actually is populated. So we go ahead and we check is this custom field? And I’m going to say is not blank.

There we go. So we said, is it not blank? We wait for up to five minutes, then we check the same thing. Is it not blank? Great, send them this email. And we’re done. However, what if it is blank? Well, in that case, what I would do is something like this. And this is the you know, make sure there’s a great customer experience. And let me just see if there’s another email. I’m just going to do this.

But please understand what I’m doing right here is I’m sending them I want to send this email out. If they don’t have a password that email should say something like, hey, Dave, will have your email your password login details sent to you soon. Now this should all happen within five minutes or thereabouts, or less.

In other words, if they come in here, and they’ve already got their password set, they go through here. Perfect. They get it instantly. If they don’t, after five minutes, we send them an email, it says, Hey, we’re going to send you your login details soon. And then importantly, you want to send a notification to somebody.

It says, Hey, figure out what is wrong here. Something went wrong. And then it’s basically a message to you or to somebody to go figure out what the heck went wrong. And then all I do is I’m going to in the automation here.

So in a perfect world, nobody would ever go down this no path. In reality. It does happen sometimes. But this way, you can prevent a horrible user experience from happening and kind of help them understand, hey, we’re going to get to you soon. And then somebody gets notified to take care of that.

Okay, last thing I want to show you here is how do you test all this stuff, you know, I don’t want to sit around for five minutes or one day or one hour or one week to make sure it’s working properly. So what you can do is for instance, let me just make this active.

This is the wait until I’m gonna go find me or one version of me in here. And I’m going to use this poor guy here as an example and I’m going to push him into an automation. Where are you give it a second. They’re little refresh, sorry, I’m sorry, I really just need to go down here.

Now I want to push myself into that automation. So I’m going to go ahead and add it to what do we call it, wait until. So go ahead, push myself in there. And it’ll show up on the side here, or it’ll show up here. So notice this, it says zero percent, so maybe I haven’t even really gone. So I’m going to go to the View. Here is what you do, all you have to do is just click on that, and then they will go down the appropriate path.

And this is how you can check so in other words, is the password field blank. So really, I should know if that’s blank or not prior to even coming here and then just click on this and it’ll go down there and we’ll show you where I am now.

Now, you don’t want to do this. Somebody else you want to do it on yourself. And then you can change the conditions, push them back into here. Nice little things. They’ll show you what happened over here. They did not meet the conditions that’s in red, and it says it was skipped. So here I am now and I’m just going actually I’m going to in this automation because I don’t want to send a notification.

But that’s how you use the Wait Until Condition in Active Campaign.