Emarsys Automation Program

[gauravgulati]

Is there a possibility that if we have an automation program that sends out email everyday, is there a way to not send the emails on specific holidays of the year?

[WillYoung]

Hi gauravgulati, that is a great question! But sadly the answer for the moment is no, we cannot exclude single days of the year from sending. We are aware of this idea, and have been looking into it - excluding specific hours of the day, specific days of the week, and specific calendar dates, but it is not a simple task given the global nature of e-commerce and the difficulty in knowing for sure which timezone a customer will be in when they receive the message. And let's not even talk about lunar holidays...!

Right now you would have to manually pause the program for the day in question and then restart it - not an ideal workaround but something that would work.

I would invite you to open a feature request for this or engage with our Continuous Influence Session - the more feedback we have from customers like you, the easier it is for us to prioritise the next development cycles.

Thanks for the great input!

[canakalin]

Hi Gaurav,

Not a feasible option but you can use the set value node in an automation program to set the current timestamp to a custom field. Let's say you have a custom field called current_date. And we have a recurring email campaign. After defining our segment, we can add a set value node. And we can define its function as "Set current timestamp". And you can choose this current_date custom field to set the timestamp. You can also set the date format(Y/D/M or D/M/Y) and choose your base company time zone.

After that, you can create another segment, With current_date field you can, for example, 30 August is a National holiday in my country and I can say current_date equals 30th August 2023 and include all the holidays. You can exclude this segment's contacts from the automation program with an exclude node As I said, there are many factors that you should be considering regarding time zones and different holidays in different countries. But some simple use cases can be done with this. I hope it helps.

BR,

Can