Delay Tiles

When it comes to creating joyful customer experiences, timing is everything. You can add pauses throughout a journey with delay tiles. Normally, when users leave one tile, they immediately arrive in the next one. But with delay tiles, you can tell Iterable to wait some amount of time (or until an action occurs) before sending another message or updating a user's information.

There are three types of delay tiles:

• Time Delay tile: Pauses users in the journey for a set period of time.
• Hold Until tile: Pauses users in the journey until they take an action or one of their user properties changes.
• Hold for Reply tile: Pauses users in the journey until they send a reply to an SMS or WhatsApp campaign.

# In this article

# Time Delay tiles

Time Delay tiles let you pause users at a certain point in the journey to ensure the timing of each message or user update is right.

# Setting up a Time Delay tile

To add a time delay to a journey, drag a Time Delay tile onto the canvas. Then, double-click it to set it up.

# Step 1: Choose a delay type

There are two options for setting up a delay in the Time Delay tile:

• Period of time — Select this option if you want to delay each user for the same amount of time (for example, 3 days). This duration is not tied to any user profile fields or events. As soon as a user enters the tile, the delay period begins. When the delay period is over, users exit the Time Delay tile and proceed to the next step of the journey.

• Date-based user/event field — Select this option to pause users for a certain amount of time before or after an important date (like their birthday). Since this date is different for each user, the delay period starts at a different time for each user. When the delay period is over, users exit the Time Delay tile and proceed to the next step of the journey.

  After selecting the date-based user profile field, select Plus or Minus to determine whether the delay period should end before or after the occurrence of the date.

# Step 2: Enter a duration

Enter the amount of time you want to pause users at this step of the journey. The maximum amount of time you can enter is 365 Days, 23 Hours, and 59 Minutes.

# Step 3: (Optional) Add extra time to the delay

You can configure a Time Delay tile to wait until a specific day of the week, time of day, and/or date before allowing users to proceed to the next step.

For example, let's say you want to send a product review message three days after users make a purchase. Your users are in different time zones and complete their purchases at different times of day, so how do you make sure the product review message doesn't arrive in the middle of the night for some customers?

You can use the Add Extra Time option to make sure customers receive this message at 11:00 AM at least three days after they made their purchase — regardless of what time they made their purchase and what time zone they're in.

You can also prevent users from moving on to the next step of the journey on certain days of the week. Check Don't Release Users On, then check the days of the week that you don't want users to move on to the next step in the journey.

Users are released from the Time Delay tile on the permitted day(s) at the same time of day as when they originally entered the tile. For example, let's say a user enters a two-day Time Delay tile at 3:00 PM on Wednesday, and the tile's settings permit users to be released on Mondays. The user will be released from the Time Delay tile at 3:00 PM on Monday.

# Example: Delaying a send

Let's say you want to wait 24 hours after users sign up before sending them a promotional message. To do this, you could add a Time Delay tile between your sign-up confirmation message and your first promotional message, like this:

# Hold Until tiles

Hold Until tiles pause users in the journey until they take an action or one of their user properties changes.

For example, let's say you want to encourage users with an empty birthday user profile field to tell you when their birthday is. You could set up a Hold Until tile that monitors for the birthday field to be populated. When users add their birthday, they're released from the Hold Until tile and sent down the Rules Met branch. You could connect this branch to the next logical journey step for your use case (for example, a message tile that sends a "Thanks for adding your birthday!" message).

With Hold Until tiles, you have greater flexibility for choosing what happens after a user takes an action or an event occurs — so you can use fewer tiles and Yes/No splits!

# Setting up a Hold Until tile

To add a hold step to a journey, drag a Hold Until tile onto the canvas. Then double-click it to configure its settings.

# Step 1: Select a hold duration

First, select how long you want users to remain in the tile while Iterable checks whether or not they meet your criteria.

You can hold users in a Hold Until tile for:

• 5 minutes
• 15 minutes
• 1 hour
• 24 hours
• 3 days
• 7 days
• 14 days
• 30 days
• Custom

# Step 2: Add your hold criteria

Next, set up the criteria that users must meet in order to proceed to the next stage of the journey.

1. Select what you want to base your rule on: the occurrence of an event or a change to a user property.

2. Add your criteria. (You can add as many conditions as you want.)

3. Click Update to save your criteria.

4. Save and publish the journey.

As soon as a user meets your hold criteria, they're released from the tile and sent down the Rules Met branch. Any users who don't meet your criteria by the end of the hold duration are sent down the Rules Not Met branch.

# Example: Making sends dependent on user actions

Let's say you're setting up a journey that sends users an offer when they sign up to receive texts from your brand. You could use a Hold Until tile to prevent users from receiving the SMS campaign until they complete your SMS opt-in process. (Users who don't sign up for text alerts won't receive the SMS campaign.)

# Hold for Reply tiles

The Hold for Reply tile holds users for a specified period of time (up to 7 days) after they receive an SMS or WhatsApp campaign in a journey. Users are released from the tile either when they send a reply to the campaign or the hold duration expires.

You can specify up to 10 replies that you expect to receive from users who respond to the SMS or WhatsApp campaign. When users go through the Hold for Reply tile, the following happens:

• Users who reply with one of your specified replies are sent down the corresponding journey path.
• Users who don’t reply are sent down the No Reply path.
• Users who reply with anything other than one of your configured replies are sent down the Other Reply path.

# Setting up a Hold for Reply tile

Grab a Hold for Reply tile from the panel and drag it onto the canvas. Double-click the tile to open its settings menu and configure it with your desired replies.

Read on to learn how to configure Hold for Reply tiles.

# Step 1: Select a channel

First, select what channel you want to configure replies for: SMS or WhatsApp.

When you select WhatsApp, you'll see the option to select a specific WhatsApp campaign. Doing so lets you automatically import any quick replies you've set up in the campaign into the Hold for Reply tile, so you don't need to manually set them up (see WhatsApp Quick Replies).

# Step 2: Set up replies

Under Replies, add the replies you expect users to text or tap in order to respond to the SMS or WhatsApp message they receive prior to entering the Hold for Reply tile. You can configure up to 10 replies in a Hold for Reply tile.

If you wish to support variations of each reply (for example, to support replies in different languages), click Add variation and set up your alternate languages or spellings. You can add up to 10 variations to each reply.

# WhatsApp quick replies

When configuring a Hold for Reply tile for a WhatsApp campaign, you have the option of selecting the related WhatsApp campaign at the top of the Hold for Reply tile settings menu. If you do this, the Hold for Reply tile imports any quick replies you've configured in the campaign's template. Once these quick replies have been imported, you'll see a list of your ungrouped quick replies at the bottom of the tile settings menu.

Quick replies must be grouped into one of the 10 possible reply groups in the Replies section in order for Iterable to route users down the appropriate journey paths for each reply. Before publishing the journey, drag each quick reply into its corresponding reply group in the tile settings menu. If you leave any quick replies ungrouped, when you publish the journey, users who reply to the campaign with any of the ungrouped quick replies will go down the Other reply branch.

# Step 3: Select a hold duration

Specify how long users should be held in the tile while Iterable waits for them to reply to the preceding SMS or WhatsApp campaign. Users can be held in a Hold for Reply tile for a maximum of 7 days.

# Want to learn more?

For more information about some of the topics in this article, check out this Iterable Academy course. Iterable Academy is open to everyone — you don't need to be an Iterable customer!

• A Moment with Support: Delay Tile Logic