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Grace periods

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, important date, objects, and relationships
• campaign exit conditions
  • particularly, exit conditions that include triggers or filters

Overview

If you were looking at a person’s journey through a campaign, you might’ve seen the term “grace period.” For example:

“Waiting in grace period for a day”

or:

“Waited in grace period for 2 hours”

Grace periods allow extra time for people to match campaign conditions. We originally added grace periods to make sure people who momentarily did not match campaign conditions would continue on in their journeys after re-matching. If people were set to exit a campaign early when they no longer matched trigger or filter conditions, we would hold them in a grace period. If they rematched filters within that timeframe, they’d move forward; otherwise, they’d exit.

However, we’ve come to learn that grace periods provide confusion more than they solve problems, one reason being they behave differently across different campaign types. Therefore, we’re removing them from our platform so that campaigns behave more predictably.

Below, we’ll explain how grace periods currently work and the changes we’re in the process of rolling out.

Segment-triggered campaigns

For segment-triggered campaigns, people may enter grace periods:

• at the start of 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.
• during a campaign (In the process of deprecating)
  • 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.
  • Once fully deprecated, people will exit immediately if they no longer match trigger or filter conditions.

For now, we’re continuing to support grace periods at the start of a segment-triggered campaign. However, we are actively phasing out grace periods during campaigns:

Example

Say you have a campaign that looks like this:

• Trigger = in segment PowerUsers
• Wait 5 minutes
• Email
• Wait 3 days
• Email

Alice enters this campaign by filling in a particular piece of information in her profile within your app, matching the Power Users segment conditions.

• She enters the first delay.
• While waiting, Alice realises she’s made a mistake with her information! She deletes that piece of information in her profile. As a result, she stops matching.

She finishes waiting five minutes. At this point, Customer.io hits pause and she becomes inactive. We don’t remove Alice from the campaign; instead, we give her a “grace” period to match again.

Wait, so how long is that grace period?

Well, that depends:

If Alice stopped matching while in a delay, then it’s half the length of the delay, but not less than 24 hours, and no more than 31 days. For example, if your delay is 3 days, then the grace period is 1.5 days. If it’s twenty minutes, the grace period is 24 hours.

If she became inactive while waiting on a time window, then we’ll wait until the end of the second window.

This is much easier with a couple of examples:

Say it’s currently Sunday, 12 noon, and Alice is waiting to receive Campaign Email 1. She becomes inactive on Monday at 8AM.

• If the time window is Monday, Wednesday, or Friday between 9AM-5PM, she has until Wednesday at 5PM to rematch.
• If the time window is just Monday, 9AM-5PM, she has until the second Monday (a week later), 5PM to match.

In Journeys, you can see exactly when a user is in a grace period, because they’ll have the label “Leaving” on their segment-triggered campaign.

What does that mean for my campaigns?

To understand this, let’s return to Alice:

Say that half an hour after becoming inactive, Alice fixes her mistake, and re-fills that information in her profile. We still want her to continue the campaign. When she fixes her info, she’ll re-join Power Users, become active, and receive your next email.

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. We’re in the process of deprecating this. Once fully deprecated, people will complete any delay actions they are in then exit, never entering a grace period.

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. We’re in the process of deprecating this. Once fully deprecated, people will exit immediately, never entering a grace period.

Need help?

If you have any questions about how this works and our plans, get in touch!