Your contacts progress down a journey at a cadence that's dictated by the time/day they first enter the journey, so most of the time, they will therefore be relatively equally distributed throughout that journey.
There are however times when you have a surge of activity and your contacts find themselves grouped together at a single point in the journey. That's what the stagger step is for.
A good example of this is if you trigger a journey based on a contact being uploaded into Kulea via a XSLX file import. In this scenario, you might have thousands of contacts all entering a journey at the same time, which isn't a problem, unless your first step is to send out an email.
Why?
Because if you're sending thousand of emails out simultaneously, your emails will inevitably be flagged as a bulk send, and may end up in the promotions folder of the recipients inbox (or, dare we even say it, the dreaded spam folder!!!).
And let's not forget that any follow up activity, such as sales alerts and task allocation, will also be created in bulk in line with the original cadence.
So, how to we flatten that activity curve?
That's where the stagger step comes in handy. The stagger step allows you to throttle the rate at which contacts pass through a journey.
Maybe you want to trickle them through slowly, at a rate of just three contacts an hour, or pick up the pace and send them through at a rate of 100 contacts every 5 minutes?
You can even choose to whether to pass contacts down a journey on working days or weekends.
The stagger step is a great addition to a journey, and it's incredibly easy to implement. Check out our how to tutorial below.