In this article, you’ll find information about how your messages are scheduled in Growbots:
Before the app schedules a message, it checks a few things:
Your sending limits
How many other messages are going to be sent on that day/period of time
The “flow” of the campaign, the app will try to find the best period of time where the campaign can be sent according to timing criteria you’ve set up in your sequence.
Send next message on the nearest free sending slot
While scheduling a batch of prospect, you can choose the “send next message on the nearest free sending slot” option:
It's important to note that the messages will actually be sent immediately only if there are free sending slots on the given day, and if all the time criteria set for the whole sequence can be met - meaning that there are free slots in the timeline for all the follow-up messages as well. The sequence requirements and sending limits are most important.
Free slots on the timeline
Let’s say that you have a campaign with 3 steps:
the initial message is going to be sent between Monday and Friday
the second step after 3 days (between Thursday and Friday)
the third step after 1 day from the second step (but the messages on this step can only be sent on Tuesdays)
Then the Timeline would look like this:
NOTE: As you can see, the third step (which was going to be sent after 1 day) is actually going to be sent after 4 days, because of the weekday criterium.
The system needs to schedule your messages according to the time criteria you’ve chosen. The more steps are in the sequence, the harder it is to adjust all the criteria to the timeline. Sometimes it is impossible to schedule messages to fill in all the gaps in the timeline.
The most important thing for the system is the campaign’s flow. You need to remember that the system may not be able to fill all the blanks in the timeline, as there have to be free slots within your daily sending limits to schedule a follow up. The system needs to find the suitable days that respect “Send x days after” criteria.
If you want to use some of these free slots, you need to de-activate all the steps beside the first one when launching a campaign. Once there is only one message in a sequence to schedule, our system will fill the gaps within the sending limits. After scheduling the first step, you can gradually activate the next steps in the sequence.
Rescheduling/unpausing
Once you make any changes to your sequence timing criteria, sending limits or the other campaigns, and you need to adjust already scheduled messages on your timeline to obey these changes, you need to reschedule the messages. Moreover, if you paused some prospects, here's how you can unpause them:
Choose the Campaign you're willing to reschedule in OR go to the My contacts view to find specific prospects,
Filter the prospects you'd like to reschedule (e.g. by STEP - In progress if you want to schedule all the prospects that are currently scheduled, or Status - Manually paused to unpause prospects)
Select the filtered prospects, click Actions → Reschedule and type a specific date or choose an option to send messages immediately.
Be mindful that the system may not send these messages on the selected day, as there have to be free slots within your daily sending limits as well as the time criteria have to be fulfilled.
Keep in mind that rescheduling will now proceed even if some prospects fail to be rescheduled. You will be in the know right in the app. If there are any failed prospects, you will see a modal showing how many. Then, you can decide whether to proceed and grab a CSV list of those who need some extra attention.
On top of that, if you decide to skip waiting for the timeline, we’ll also send you an email with the number of failed prospects and that handy CSV list. That’s how you can focus on “troublemakers” while we take care of the rest of the prospects!
Out of office
Please note that when a prospect sends you an out-of-office reply and gives you a particular date there, the system will automatically reschedule them. When there’s no date detected or an invalid date, we’ll automatically reschedule the campaign for 2 weeks by default. It will help you save a lot of time - no more searching for these prospects and rescheduling them!