Grace periods
UpdatedA grace period is a period of time people wait to enter or exit your campaign. It’s meant to prevent people from bouncing in and out of campaigns due to quick changes in data.
To simplify things, newly created campaigns no longer include a grace period before people exit
We’ve found that grace periods are more confusing than helpful for managing your audience, one reason being they behave differently across different campaign types. So moving forward, you won’t see people waiting in grace periods before they exit any newly created campaigns.
To understand grace periods, you’ll need to understand how the following work in Customer.io:
- Campaign triggers and filters
- Grace periods apply to these triggers: segment change (legacy), important date, objects, and relationships
- Campaign exit conditions
- Particularly, exit conditions that include triggers or filters
When grace periods apply
A grace period is a period of time people wait to enter or exit your campaign. Grace periods apply depending on the trigger type of your campaign and when the campaign was made.
| Trigger type | Possible grace period after entering a campaign | Possible grace period before exiting a campaign |
|---|---|---|
| Segment change | yes | yes |
| Attribute or segment | no | no |
| Object updated | no | yes |
| Person added to object | no | yes |
| Relationship changed with object | no | yes |
| Important date | no | yes |
| Event | no | no |
| Form submission | no | no |
| Webhook | no | no |
To simplify things, newly created campaigns no longer include a grace period before people exit
We’ve found that grace periods are more confusing than helpful for managing your audience, one reason being they behave differently across different campaign types. So moving forward, you won’t see people waiting in grace periods before they exit any newly created campaigns.
Grace periods when entering a campaign
When entering a campaign, you’ll only run into grace periods with our legacy segment-triggered campaigns. People may wait in a grace period after entering your campaign when they match the campaign’s trigger conditions, but not the filter conditions.
Grace periods when exiting a campaign
If you set up your campaign such that people exit early when they no longer match trigger or filter conditions, we first hold people in a grace period when they match these exit conditions. This ensures they meet your conditions for a period of time and should actually exit. If they rematched filters within that timeframe, they’d move forward; otherwise, they’d exit.
To simplify things, newly created campaigns no longer include a grace period before people exit
We’ve found that grace periods are more confusing than helpful for managing your audience, one reason being they behave differently across different campaign types. So moving forward, you won’t see people waiting in grace periods before they exit any newly created campaigns.
Keep in mind, you’ll only see people waiting in exit grace periods for campaigns triggered by segment changes, dates, objects, or relationships.
In older accounts, some campaigns may have exit grace periods while other campaigns do not. On new campaigns in these accounts, you’ll see a note in your exit conditions that grace periods are disabled to signal a difference in exit behavior from your older campaigns.
How they impact campaigns
Legacy segment-triggered campaigns
Your campaign uses our legacy Segment change trigger if you can only specify segments, not attributes, directly in your campaign trigger.
For segment-triggered campaigns, people may be held in grace periods:
- When entering a campaign
- A person begins their journey once they match the trigger conditions. If they don’t meet the filter conditions by the time they reach an action that impacts a person (message delivery, attribute updates, static segment updates, collection queries, create event actions, or batch updates), they enter into a grace period.
- When exiting a campaign
- If the campaign lets people exit early when people no longer match trigger or filter conditions, we hold them in a grace period when they meet the exit conditions. If they rematched trigger and filter conditions within that timeframe, they’d move forward; otherwise, they’d exit.
Object and relationship-triggered campaigns
If the campaign lets people exit early when they no longer match filters, they will enter a grace period when they meet the exit conditions.
Date-triggered campaigns
If the campaign lets people exit early when they no longer match filters, they will enter a grace period when they meet the exit conditions.
Prevent grace periods
To prevent entrance grace periods, incorporate your filters into your trigger conditions for legacy segment-triggered campaigns. This way, people will not enter your campaign, and therefore not wait in a grace period, unless they meet all of your trigger conditions.
To prevent exit grace periods, choose an early exit condition that does not include trigger or filter conditions. You can either have people never exit early and move through your entire workflow or choose to have them exit after they achieve the campaign’s conversion goal.
Fix early or unexpected exits
To simplify things, newly created campaigns no longer include a grace period before people exit
We’ve found that grace periods are more confusing than helpful for managing your audience, one reason being they behave differently across different campaign types. So moving forward, you won’t see people waiting in grace periods before they exit any newly created campaigns.
This may mean, however, that people exit earlier than you’re used to.
Here are two campaign changes that may help if grace periods used to lead to desirable behavior in your campaigns:
- Change your exit condition to “People don’t exit early, they move through the entire workflow” to keep people moving through the campaign after they enter.
- If people frequently join and exit segments used to trigger or filter your campaign, remove the segments from your triggers or filters.
- For instance, if your segment criteria contains “has not visited app in last 1 day”, people can quickly leave the segment, meaning they’ll leave any campaigns using that segment as well if the campaigns have early exit conditions. Instead, consider using the segment in a Wait Until action to control how and when people flow through the campaign.
If you need support configuring your campaigns after this change, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager, or the Technical Support team through your dashboard (Click Need help? > Get help with an issue) and include a link to the campaign.
