How to send multiple follow-up emails at prespecified timepoints 🔗
When running a long-term study, it's common to need to send
emails to participants at regular intervals or at predetermined
times. As you may recall from the manual, you can use the
*repeat
keyword to repeatedly run any block of code, including (for
example) scheduling emails to be sent. And to schedule an email
to be sent sometime in the future, you can use the
*when
keyword (under
*email
) to specify a date and time to send the email. One important
thing to remember, however, is that using the
*when
keyword requires you to specify a time and date
in the future
. In other words, you
cannot
set the value of
*when
to be
calendar::now
; you must schedule the email at least 1 second out in the
future, like
*when: calendar::now + 1.seconds
.
Example of how to schedule and send multiple follow-up emails 🔗
In this example, we use
*repeat
to schedule weekly follow-up emails. Note especially how we
increase the
timeToSend
value in each iteration of the repeat loop by adding
1.weeks
to it each time.
>> emailNumber = 0
>> timeToSend = calendar::now + 1.minute
*repeat: 11
*email
*to: {theirEmail}
*identifier: email{emailNumber}
*when: timeToSend
*subject: Invitation to weekly tests - week {emailNumber}!
*body
Hello again!
Here is the link for your study questions for day {emailNumber}!
https://www.guidedtrack.com/programs/{runcode}/run?participantID={participantID}&emailNumber={emailNumber}&week={emailNumber}
Thank you so much for your responses!
>> emailNumber = emailNumber + 1
>> timeToSend = timeToSend + 1.weeks
Next: How to share results with participants via email