Question about follow-ups, delays, and crons

[melanie]

I think I understand all this, but I want to verify.

We have a set of follow-ups I'm adding now that we want to send every Saturday.  Today is Wednesday, and we've already processed daily mail for the day.

Therefore, the first follow-up should be set with a delay of 2, updating all users.  This way, all current users will receive the first mailing on Saturday - right?

The remaining follow-ups - can I schedule these with a delay of 6 AND a cron of * * 6?

I'm just trying to make sure I do everything right so that everything is going out on a Saturday.

Thanks

[DW]

You can use a Delay alongside cron-style timing if you like, but it would not be required.  ListMail waits until the next day to consider sending the next followup even when all delays are 0.

It sounds like you could simply have delays of 0 and cron-style timing * * 6 for all followups, or * * 6 for the first followup and a delay of 6 for every subsequent followup.

Regards

[AlanT]

If the first mailing should go out the very next Saturday, you don't need a delay value - the cron value will work all by itself.

The same is true regarding the following follow-ups.  You can set a delay of 0 and a cron of * * 6 to send each message out on Saturdays.

The only time you need to add a delay in addition to the cron is to make sure you don't send a followup immediately after the previous message.  

For example, on one of my lists, I set a delay for the first followup to 3 to make sure I don't start the sequence too soon after someone subscribes.  This ensures they have more than a couple of days to go over the content from the welcome email before starting the weekly series, which in my case goes out on Fridays (with articles on Mondays, and promotions on Wednesdays).