When to use multiple Send Schedulers

On your Send page, you have the ability to add as many Send Schedulers as you'd like - but with more schedulers comes more complexity. Ideally, you will have as few as possible in order to make your life easier, but there will be times where more Send Schedulers will be needed.

On the subject of making your life easier....  make sure you give each Send Scheduler a name in the top left of your Scheduler! This will make it so much easier to understand the logic of how surveys are being sent in your system later.

Sending Surveys to different time zones

Sending "Lifecycle" Surveys

Custom Contact Rules

Sending Surveys to different time zones

In our Send Schedulers, you can utilize the "send time" field found on the "Weekdays & Time" section - if you were to click "10:00" in the screenshot below, you could select a different time. 

In this example, we want to send a survey to our West Coast USA customers at 10am, and a survey to our Nepal customers at 10am their time. To do this, we would set the time to 10am for the USA customers, and the time to 22:00 for Nepal because they are 12 hours ahead of us. The calculations for this can be a bit tricky! Google is your friend here. :) ("What country is 12 hours ahead of me")

Sending "Lifecycle" Surveys

A typical use-case for this is "Lifecycle" surveys, where surveys are sent at different points at the customer journey. You will set your Surveys up based on custom data fields - you can either use an existing field like "Customer_phase" (with values of "onboarding", "existing", "renewing") or based on a date field.

If you have a field similar to "customer_phase" in your CRM...

• ...We can set up a scheduler for each phase of the journey, surveying at 2 weeks, 3 months, and 3 months before the yearly renewal:
  • One scheduler would have the rule:
    • customer_phase | is | "onboarding"
  • The next scheduler would have the rule:
    • customer_phase | is | "existing"
  • The last scheduler would have the rule:
    • customer_phase | is | "renewing"

This is dependent on the fields you are bringing in from your CRM - if we don't have the data, we can't set the rules. 

If we have a date field (say, "closed_won_date")...

• ...We can set up a scheduler for each phase of the journey, surveying at 2 weeks, 3 months, and 3 months before the yearly renewal:
  • One scheduler would be set to:
    • closed_won_date | is exactly | 14 | days | ago | don't repeat
  • The next scheduler would be set to:
    • closed_won_date | is exactly | 90 | days | ago | don't repeat
  • The last scheduler would be set to:
    • closed_won_date | is exactly | 270 | days | ago | don't repeat

You can definitely have more than one date field - you will just need to reach out to [e-mail] to convert all custom fields to date fields. Here is an example of a Send Scheduler with date logic:

 

Custom Contact Rules

By default, every Send Scheduler will obey your Global Contact Rules at the bottom of the Send Page.

However, there may be occasions where you will want to have custom rules for a specific Send Scheduler. Select Custom Rules from the dropdown to override your Global Contact Rules and set a different length of time to wait between sending surveys to existing and new Contacts. 

The Survey Scheduler allows users to define custom send rules that apply specifically to the same survey template. This enhancement ensures that relational and transactional surveys operate independently, preventing one from interfering with the other.

How It Works

When creating or modifying a scheduler, users can now select "Custom Contact Rules" under the Custom Scheduler option. This enables them to:

• Specify the number of days between survey sends.
• Choose whether to count days from:
  • The last time any survey template was sent.
  • The last time the same survey template was sent.

Behavior Based on Custom Template Selection

1. If "No Custom Template" is Selected

• The scheduler finds matching contacts and checks which survey template is assigned to them.
• It then determines when that same survey template was last sent before applying the send rule.

2. If a Specific Custom Template is Selected (e.g., "Template A")

• The scheduler will only check when Template A was last sent before applying the send rule.

This feature provides greater flexibility, ensuring that surveys remain targeted and independent from one another while adhering to custom send rules.

 

Sending Multiple Survey Templates

This help article talks about how you can use the "Custom Template" dropdown on multiple Send Schedulers to send multiple Survey Templates based on rules you control. This is a very visual and helpful way to understand the logic of how and why surveys are sent to individual people.

Let us know if you come up with other solutions using Send Schedulers! We're always excited to see what people come up with.