Journey Setup: 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 before sending another message or updating a user's information.

There are two types of delay tiles:

• Time Delay
• Hold Until

Time Delay tiles pause users in the journey for a specific period of time. Hold Until tiles pause users in the journey until they take an action or one of their user properties changes.

# 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 profile 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.

# 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 use cases

# Send users a promotional message 24 hours after they sign up

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 users until they sign up to receive texts from your brand

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.)

# 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