I have build a flow that will send an email to a staff member on their birthday. I am using a Campaign Monitor ‘transactional’ email to and Parabola is working out when it’s someone’s birthday, and is triggering the email send.
Currently, the email will send when the flow is scheduled to run, so at the moment that would be 9am GMT. We have users all in several different countries and ideally, the email would send at 9 am in their local timezone (timezone is in my dataset).
Does anyone have any ideas on how I could do this?
Parabola does not support scheduling rules based on the value of a cell. Feel free to post that in the #feature-requests section of our community forum.
Try updating your subscriber data in Campaign Mailer instead. Their documentation notes that you can make a PUT request to your subscriber resource.
This video shows how you can trigger an email campaign using a specified date field. They seem to use the values in the Birthday column field to trigger the automation journey.
The values in that column are set to 12:00 am UTC. We’ll those the dates into Unix seconds so we can calculate and adjust the hours. The Format dates step should do the trick.
Using an Insert if/else column, we can target your Timezone column to create a new column called Calculator and set the value to 61,200 seconds, since 9:00 am PST is 17 hours ahead of 12:00 am UTC. Add a new rule for every timezone in your dataset.
Thanks for getting back to me. This was a great suggestion that should have worked. Unfortunately, the Campaign Monitor automation flows only runs at midnight as per the account’s timezone, so the proposed solution doesn’t work. I can delay the email to send by a set number of hours, but not on a per user basis.
It feels as though I need Parabola to trigger the email to send at the exact time I require. My thoughts are currently to have a flow per timezone, or to have one flow which runs hourly.
I was hoping that would work. Thanks for letting me know!
You can set your flow(s) on a schedule, but it gets tricky if the data shows multiple birthdays in the same timezone.
Try importing your birthday data and compare it with today’s date using a Compare Dates step. If the birth date is equal to the Current DateTime, the value in the Difference column should start with 0.
You can then break this into multiple flows based on the timezone. You can use a Filter rows step to target the Timezone and Difference columns to segment birthdays based on today’s date and the current timezone.
If you run your flow once/day, you can schedule it to run at any hour based on the timezone you’ve filtered for.
