Some businesses, such as financial institutions, need to regularly send the same email to their customers in order to check in with them or keep them abreast of certain information, such as their account balance. This could be accomplished by manually scheduling a new Email Send every month, or it can be handled for a finite number of occurrences using a Campaign Automation. But what if you want to automate the sending and have the emails go out indefinitely? This can be accomplished using a Dynamics workflow.
NOTE: Workflows are native Dynamics components, not part of the Click solution, so the technical support we can provide for them is limited.
This example is a workflow set to run on contacts and is set it to send on the same day once per month. The workflow sends the desired email to the specified contact, then waits 1 month and calls itself as a child workflow, causing it to loop.
The workflow could be set to run automatically or run as an on demand process. The option you choose depends on when you want the emails to go out. In this case, I want the emails to always go out on the first of the month, so I will run the workflow as an on demand process and wait until the first of the month to initiate it on my contact. Dynamics will allow you to either run the workflow on one contact at a time, or you can select multiple contacts at once and run the workflow on each of them.
Although workflows can be set to run on a specific day or to wait a certain amount of time before progressing, they cannot be set to wait for a more general time frame, such as “wait until the first of the month.” This is why I am choosing to postpone running the workflow on contacts until the first of a month; this ensures that the workflow starts on the right day, then the one month wait period makes sure it continues to fire on the first of each following month.
If the day of the month on which the emails go out does not matter, you could also run the workflow automatically based on various initiation criteria, such as the creation of the contact.