Waits control the timing of your automations. Without them, every step on a path happens almost at once. Put six emails in a row and they'll all go out at nearly the same time. Add a Wait element between each one, and you can send one email every three days instead.
In the builder, you'll find the Wait element with the filter elements, alongside Condition, Fork, Go to and End. To add one, click What Happens Next? on your map and choose Wait. Then pick an option from the "Wait here until" dropdown and click Done. Contacts who reach the wait stay there until its condition is met, then move on to the next step.
The most common option is "Some time passes." Choose the number of days, hours and minutes. The smallest wait is one second. You can also check the box to wait until a time of day, so emails don't land in the middle of the night.
Keep in mind how these combine. Waits count full 24-hour periods. So "wait one day, then until 10 AM" means 24 hours, plus however long it takes to reach 10 AM again. Think about when contacts will arrive at the step.
For date and time settings, you choose your account's time zone or the contact's time zone. You set your account's time zone under your profile icon, then Administration, Data, Localization.
"A specific date arrives" holds contacts until a calendar date you pick. Check "Ignore the year" if it should repeat every year. If you don't, anyone who reaches the wait after that date will sit there indefinitely. If contacts join your map over time, use the "Today is a specific date" trigger instead.
You can also wait until a date relative to a contact's date field, like a birthday or an anniversary. Choose how many days before or after the saved date, and choose to ignore the saved year for events that repeat.
"The day of the week is" releases contacts on the days you choose. It's handy for a newsletter that goes out every Monday morning, or for dripping out course content weekly.
Finally, a wait can hold contacts forever, until a trigger or a goal moves them somewhere else on the map. Every goal also comes with its own wait above it. By default, contacts continue the moment they achieve the goal. We'll cover that in the next lesson.
Be careful when you change a published wait. If you shorten it, time already spent counts. Change five days to three, and anyone who's waited three or four days moves on right away. And if you delete a wait that has contacts on it, those contacts are removed from the map. Ontraport warns you first.
One more timing note. Bulk emails and texts go out in batches every few minutes, so delivery can lag by up to five minutes.
So: use waits to space out your steps, by time, date, contact date, day of the week, or until something happens. Next up: goals, and how they move contacts the moment they act.