Contact date rules: tasks and messages on a contact's own key dates

A contact date rule adds a task for a teammate, or sends the contact an email or a text, when one of a contact's own key dates comes round. It works for contacts with no deal in Marketli, so a book of clients who settled years ago can still get an anniversary call, a rate review or a short note.

A typical rule: 1 month after the settlement anniversary, every year, add "Anniversary check-in" for your client manager, for current and past clients. Or, 90 days before fixed rate expiry, text the contact to book a review.

Contact date rules come with the CRM module and your contacts in Marketli. You do not need CRM pipelines switched on. They are set up by an owner or admin.

Adding a rule

Go to Workspaces → Setup → Pipelines and find Contact date rules.
Choose Add rule.
Under When, set how many days, weeks or months, whether that is before or after, and which key date: settlement, fixed rate expiry, interest-only expiry or loan end.
For a settlement date you can choose Every year, on the anniversary. The rule then runs on each anniversary of the settlement, counted from the year after it settled. A yearly rule can count at most a year before or after the anniversary. 29 February counts as 28 February in other years.
Under Which contacts, tick the kinds of contact it covers: current clients and past clients are ticked to start with, and you can add leads and other contacts.
Under Do, choose Add a task for a teammate or Send the contact an email or text.
For a task, give it a title and choose the teammate who gets it. You can also give it a due date a number of days after it appears, and email the teammate when it lands.
For a message, see Messages to the contact below.
Choose Save.

A new rule is saved switched off. Switch it on from the list when you are ready.

Switching a rule on

Before anything happens you see what the rule will do:

how many contacts have already passed the date,
how many will reach it in the next 30 days,
how many have no date for it, and
how many are left to a deal (see below).

From now on is the default: only contacts that reach the date from today are included. Also catch up includes the contacts already past the date as well, and asks you to confirm the number. A yearly rule catches up at most the last year, so each contact gets at most one task or message from it.

For a text rule you also see how the texts sit against your daily limit of automated texts (200 a day, shared with your other automations such as birthday texts). Catching up sends at most half of that, 100 texts a day, so your other automations always have room; the preview says roughly how many days a catch-up takes. That is an estimate, because your other automated texts share the limit.

Changing when a rule that is on runs, which contacts it covers or what it does shows you the same numbers again. Changing only the wording saves straight away.

When the task is added

Rules are checked every 15 minutes, and tasks are added from 9am, business time. A date that has passed is still acted on for up to three days, so nothing is missed over a weekend.

The teammate gets an in-app notification, and an email if the rule asks for one. The task shows on their Today screen under Contact tasks due once it is due, on the contact's profile under Tasks and date rules, and on the Calendar. They are reminded on the day it is due and again the day after if it is still open.

If the teammate has left, or cannot see the contact (for example the contact is in a branch they do not belong to), the task is still added, with nobody on it. It is listed under Unassigned contact tasks on the Contact date rules card for an owner or admin to give to someone.

Messages to the contact

A message rule sends one email or one text to the contact's own email address or mobile number. It always comes from your business: texts from your business's main number, emails from your business's verified email domain, with replies going back to that address.

Write the text, or choose an email template, using the buttons under the box to add the contact's details:

First name, the first word of the contact's name,
Preferred name, the name they go by, or their first name if none is set,
Full name,
The date the rule counts from (for a yearly rule, this year's anniversary), and
Your business.

Details that only make sense on a deal, such as the deal's stage or the deal owner, can't be used in a contact rule, in the text, the subject or the template. Saving and switching on tell you which ones to take out. A text must include Your business, so the contact knows who it is from. A text must use plain characters (for example a hyphen, not a long dash) and stay within 3 parts once the details are filled in.

Messages go out between 8am and 8pm your business's time, on the day or the day after. To keep it to a friendly amount:

a contact gets at most one of these messages a day, a birthday text included (one still to go out that morning counts too). A second one waits for the next day,
contacts who share a mobile number or email address are treated as one person: they get one message, not one each,
when your daily limit of automated texts is reached, the rest wait until there is room, usually the next day, rather than being dropped,
a message due on a date is not sent more than a week late, and
a contact never gets the same message twice for the same date, even after a merge or a corrected date.

A message is not sent, and the contact's history says why, when the contact:

replied STOP to your texts, or their email address bounced or was marked as spam,
has declined an invitation from your business on any deal, including archived ones,
has no mobile number or email address,
has not agreed to receive emails from you (for emails only), or

when your business has no main number (for texts) or no verified email domain (for emails), or the email template was archived. Contact rule messages don't include an unsubscribe link, the same as birthday texts and deal messages.

When a deal already has the date

If a contact has a live deal whose own key date is the same date, and that deal's pipeline already has a date rule for it, the contact rule leaves that contact to the deal so they do not get the same task twice. For a message, only a deal message rule counts, and only for the deal's main client. The contact's profile says so.

Changing or clearing a date

If a contact's key date changes, open tasks a rule added for that date move to the new due date. If the date is cleared, the tasks stay open and say the date has been removed. A date changed on or after the day it was due does not trigger the rule again for that date.

On the contact

Open a contact to see Tasks and date rules:

Open tasks, which anyone who can see the contact can complete or dismiss,
Coming up: each rule that is on, with the date it will add its task or send its message, or the reason it won't (for example "no settlement date" or "the rule does not cover this kind of contact"), and
History: every time a rule ran, sent, waited or was skipped, with the reason.

When you merge two contacts, their tasks and rule history move to the contact you keep, and a message either record already got is not sent again.