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.
If you are scheduling a campaign and you pick “send immediately” option, but the sequence requirements cannot be met, then the app won’t send them immediately. The sequence requirements and sending limits are more important than the “send immediately" feature.
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
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. In order to do that, you'll need to:
- Choose the Campaign you're willing to reschedule in OR go to the My Prospects view to find specific prospects,
- Filter the prospects you'd like to reschedule (eg. by STEP - In progress if you want to schedule all the prospects that are currently scheduled)
- 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.
