Looking to send a one-time email to many contacts (now or at a scheduled time)? Smart Campaigns are designed for multi-step sequences over time. For a single send — immediately or scheduled — use Bulk Email instead. See Sending Bulk Email.
By design, Smart Campaigns wait a set number of days you specify between steps before sending the next message. This way, they're perennial and reusable.
However, many of our clients still use it to promote time-sensitive events and see phenomenal results. Of course, this requires a little more planning. When applying a campaign, you'll have the option to set when it begins. From there, you'll just need to do a little math as to which day the following step will fall on.
How the campaign "clock" works
Smart Campaign timing is step-to-step, not measured from the campaign start. Each step has its own "after waiting ___ days" setting that counts from when the previous step was sent.
- Step 1 goes out on the start date you choose when you apply the campaign — there is no wait before it.
- Each later step waits its set number of days after the prior step was sent, then goes out on the next day that falls inside that step's sending window.
- The wait is processed first, then the day-of-week and time-of-day window are applied. By default that window is Monday–Friday, 9 AM–noon in your time zone — so if the wait lands on a weekend, the message goes out the next weekday.
Example — a 3-email campaign with "after waiting 7 days" on steps 2 and 3, started on a Monday:
- Step 1 → sends that Monday (the start date)
- Step 2 → 7 days later, the following Monday
- Step 3 → 7 days after step 2, the Monday after that
So if a step is set to "after waiting 7 days," the system waits the full 7 days from the previous step before that email goes out. The campaign does not pause before step 1 — step 1 sends on the start date itself.
Understanding the "On:" and "At:" send-day options
Each campaign step has two scheduling dropdowns, plus the wait field:
- On: the day of the week the step is allowed to send. This is a single choice — you pick either "Any Day" or one specific option (Mon-Fri, Mon-Sat, Sat-Sun, or an individual weekday). "Any Day" and a specific day are mutually exclusive; you cannot select both, and you don't need to. "Any Day" simply means the step has no day-of-week restriction and can send on whatever day the wait lands on.
- At: the time of day the step sends — "Any Time," a random 9 AM–noon window, or a specific time.
- after waiting [N] days: the number of days to wait after the previous step. Brokerkit applies the wait first, then uses "On" and "At" to pick the exact send slot.
Tip: If you want a step to land on an exact date, set the wait so the step falls on or just before that date, then choose the matching weekday under "On:" (or leave it on "Any Day" if any day is fine).
If you selected a start date by mistake and want to change it, you'll need to bulk select the contacts, unsubscribe them from the campaign, and then resubscribe them with the correct start date.