How to get my smart campaign to ignore triggers outside of business hours

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To make your smart campaign in Marketo ignore triggers outside of business hours, you can use a combination of smart list filters and schedule settings. Here's a general approach to achieve this:

1. Use a "Member of Smart List" filter to check the time when the trigger occurs. For example, you might use the "Date of Activity" filter to specify the time of the trigger.

2. Add additional filters to check if the trigger falls within your business hours. You can do this by using "Date of Activity" filters to specify the time range corresponding to your business hours. For example, you might use the "Hour of Day" filter to check if the trigger falls within your specified business hours.

3. If the trigger falls outside of business hours, you can use a "Remove from Flow" action or a "Change Data Value" action to skip the processing for that trigger.

4. Additionally, you can set the schedule for the smart campaign to only run during your business hours. You can do this by specifying the start and end times for the schedule in the smart campaign settings.

By combining these smart list filters and schedule settings, you can ensure that your smart campaign only processes triggers that fall within your specified business hours and ignores triggers that occur outside of those hours.

Create a webhook response Yes/No based on your desired time-frame that can be used to 'Remove From Flow", first step in the Flow. 

Is there a need for the action to take place exactly at the time of the trigger, or for it to be a trigger at all? I'm wondering if you just have batches running regularly for whatever this use case is. You can schedule a morning and afternoon batch at specified times to cover the hours of operations, and anyone who qualifies can just run through during those times. Anyone who qualified outside of the hours of operations would not run through if you set up parameters for your times.

This obviously wouldn't work if you're needing to use trigger tokens, I'm just struggling to come up with any other way to specifically exclude those from after hours.

Unfortunately — other than a very hacky way to do this with a series of DateTime and String fields that’s unimaginably complex — this isn’t supported within the platform. You can use a webhook-compatible service to do it, though.

That service can work one of two ways:

(1) call it 2x per day (9am and 5pm) to activate/deactivate the campaign

(2) call it every time a your trigger action occurs and have it check the time in real time

(1) is obviously more efficient once built, but takes significantly more dev to make it call back into the Marketo API. (2) is very simple, just checking the {{system.datetime}} against a range.

There's Local Asset Expiration to Deactivate the trigger campaign, but it doesn't have the option to auto-schedule the recurring activation/deactivation of trigger campaigns. You can activate and deactivate trigger campaigns at 9 AM and 5 PM respectively each day using API. Out of curiosity and to ensure we aren't running into an XY problem, what's the business case behind this?